Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Valve has released the first Beta version of SteamOS last week. It requires UEFI support, Intel or AMD 64-bit processor, 4GB or more memory, 500GB or larger disk and NVIDIA, AMD or Intel GPUs.
A community image of SteamOS 1.0 Beta has been created, for the computers not compatible with the UEFI secure boot. A third party geek has replaced grub-efi to grub-pc for bypassing the UEFI dependencies, added the apt-cdrom repository and edited the default.preseed file, in order to enable the users to manually create partitions.
Also, the community image of SteamOS has been created by using grub-mkrescue, with the original grub.cfg file. Installation instructions and download links are provided on Reddit.
For those who don’t know yet, Valve, now a member of The Linux Foundation, has initiated some ambitions projects: the SteamOS, a Linux operating system optimized for gaming, the Steam Machine, a gaming colsole that will run with SteamOS and the Steam Controller, a game controller specially designed for SteamOS and the Steam Machine. A demo video of the Steam Controller can be found here.
The first Beta version of SteamOS 1.0 (which has been released a week ago) is a customized Debian Wheezy system, running on Kernel 3.10.11, back-porting fresh Nvidia, Catalyst and Mesa binary drivers, uses SysVinit as the system’s default event manager, a personalized GNOME 3.4 as the default desktop environment for the Big Picture mode and Xcompmgr, a lightweight graphics compositor.