Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Debian 7.4 “Wheezy” has been released a few days ago. Also worth mentioning, SteamOS is available in two versions, a stable one and a Beta one, the Beta version receiving all the changes which will be eventually added to the stable version.
This is what was added to the SteamOS Beta version, since the release of Debian 7.4:
- Add additional packages to the repo to support gdb, NFS, and creating an alchemist chroot
- Preinstall all the firmware packages to enable supporting more wireless network adapters
- Added steamos-updatelevel dummy package; its version is guaranteed to increase with every new update
- Updated e2fsprogs, iptables, libdrm, debootstrap, initramfs-tools, curl, libav, eglibc to incorporate upstream Debian fixes
The story so far:
As you may know, 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 in November, 2013) 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.
While the Nvidia graphics cards were supported by default, Valve has recently patched SteamOS to officially support both Intel and AMD GPUs.