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Comment by sillysaurus2 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if this can be installed in VirtualBox? I'd like to try it, but I don't feel like setting up a new computer for it or dual booting.

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I suspect so, it's based on Debian 7.1.

The main problem is they seem to have put it on a single server instead of the Steam CDN and now no one's able to download it

If you use wget, the download'll resume automatically whenever it chokes:

  wget http://repo.steamstatic.com/download/SteamOSInstaller.zip

But it's choking every percent for me, so I doubt it'll finish.

wget -c will look for a partial file (so when it bombs out you can just start it again). Sometimes it makes sense to force a file name, that one looks like it will work fine.

They people to use the CDN link and not steamstatic: http://repo.steampowered.com/download/SteamOSInstaller.zip

Sorry, invalid assumption - it's a zip made to be extracted to a FAT32 drive for UEFI install. This is difficult to do on VirtualBox.

Well, shit. Is there any hope of virtualbox (or even vmware) support?

yes

Use another VM or nix install to grab the zip, extract it to a path and run the following:

    genisoimage -o test2.iso -r -J steamos/

(assuming you extracted the zip to steamos/)

I've edited this post to remove most of what I said, the installer as it stands now is designed to work on UEFI compatible systems only and VirtualBox isn't compatible enough.

I'm not sure I can be bothered fixing it as the SteamOS TOS forbids distribution of modified versions.

Oh come on. At least give me a hint on how to fix it. :)

You said you got partway through the installation -- did it finish successfully?

Yes, installing an ISO created like that will work, but the way X is configured breaks all of the ttys in VirtualBox. I've got a virtual serial port ready to debug the issue but booting in recovery would work too.

If you're still interested: https://gist.github.com/voltagex/7955961

I'm not sure I can be bothered fixing it as the SteamOS TOS forbids distribution of modified versions.

Wait, what? How does that work, vis-a-vis the GPL?

The GPL doesn't cover every file in a distribution.

Along these lines, does anyone know the best way to boot from the downloaded zip file in VirtualBox? I'm currently trying to convert the contents to a bootable .iso, but I'm not sure if that'll work.

Use mkisofs to create an iso from the unzipped contents and use the iso like any other install media.

I got it running under Virtualbox fairly easily. It's not that exciting, just Gnome 3 with a few extra desktop icons. You can choose to login to big picture mode directly from Gdm.

From the FAQ:

"NVIDIA graphics card (AMD and Intel graphics support coming soon)"

I believe VirtualBox emulates a graphics card, and not an NVIDIA one, so it may not run even on machines with an Nvidia card.

VirtualBox emulates a generic VESA adapter, with some extensions to pass OpenGL commands to the host (and includes a fork of Wine's Direct3D-on-OpenGL implementation to provide some degree of acceleration for Windows guests).

Using a real NVidia GPU from within a VM is possible, but not with VirtualBox, and not with most gaming systems (due to either having necessary hardware features disabled on overclockable Intel CPUs, or AMD systems lacking a second GPU for the host).

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