Valve's Steam Linux Beta: "Fairly Soon"

[Kano]

It is very unlikely that something works until

http://store.steampowered.com/public...m_client_linux

is readable. Its a piece of cake to parse those files usually.

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthrea...622#post123622

But right now it is impossible to use.

[Spectre]

You really should not download and execute random stuff from random untrusted third-party websites you find on the murky web.

It can be malware.

I didn't run it on my actual machine I ran it via a virtual machine that booted from a live cd with the Internet turned off. There were no shared folders.

[KameZero]

That doesn't mean anything. I have several extremely DRM'd Steam games that don't require Steam to launch them. :)

Edit: at least I thought I did. This is a new laptop and I've only got a couple newer games on it. Was pretty sure a few games I've played before didn't though; hard to verify without redownloading them. I may be totally wrong on this one, but I'm still ~67.12% sure all Steam games have DRM.

Would two examples make you 0% sure? :p

Dungeons of Dredmor: Absolutely 100% no DRM. I can take the installed steam copy and run it on any computer, on any OS, with or without steam.

Steel Storm: Burning retribution: See above.

Most developers CHOOSE to use steam's DRM (or apparently don't know it's possible not to :p)

[elanthis]

You're totally right. Verified it with one of our Steam gurus this morning that it's entirely optional.

I'm curious now whether it's always been that way since I know some smaller devs offer DRM-free copies everywhere but Steam. Possibly they just didn't know how to opt out. I'll be letting some of them know in any case, less DRM in the world is better.

In any case, yes, I am now 0% sure on this.

My mistake for making an "educated guess" instead of just finding out for sure in the first place.

[damvcoool]

This may not be the place to ask, or maybe a new thread is needed for this, but Will Valve be releasing their Development tools for Linux as well or just the client and some games?
it would be awesome to develop Source Games right from linux

[entropy]

This may not be the place to ask, or maybe a new thread is needed for this, but Will Valve be releasing their Development tools for Linux as well or just the client and some games?
it would be awesome to develop Source Games right from linux

How is the situation on Mac OS?
I guess you can expect the same thing for Linux.

[3vi1]

More than likely, "fairly quickly" means sometime in late October or early November.

My reasoning is that they're targeting Ubuntu first, so they'll probably want to make sure everything works well with 12.10, which isn't coming out until Oct. 18th. That release will of course include all the latest drivers and xserver in its repos, the newer kernel, updated Unity, and other potential points of breakage.

Holding the release a couple of months and ensuring everything works smoothly out of the gate should be worth it to them simply to get less hate-mail from people that try to upgrade to Quantal on day one (or even during the beta cycle), and potentially experience breakage with Steam/L4D2 (and spread bad word-of-mouth).

At the *very* best, I think we might see it around Oct. 11th... after the kernel is frozen and the RC's are ready.

[boot]

The fairly quickly was in regard to the beta not the actual release.

[xehpuk]

wut I thawt Linux was imunez 2 viruzez n olny wind0z3 lusers had 2 wurry bout dat crapz!!?!??/``1!`//`~?~!!`11?

Yes, if Linux get enough users there will also be trojans, worms viruses etc.

I would hope valve goes one step further than just a port. I think it should work as in Andriod where a new userid is created for each app installed. That would make it much harder for malware to take over the system and much easier to get rid of bad apps/programs. As it is today every time I install a program its like unprotected sex.

I have also heard that Ubuntu is working on a version of Ubuntu that can run on top of Android. Perhaps that would be better for a steam on smart-TV thing?