Valve Beginning To Look At Steam Linux Not On Ubuntu

[uid313]

The beta has some bugs, I think.

There were some bugs on the input control when registering a new account where the carret in the textbox would insert text in reverse. I.e typing "hello" appeared as "olleh".

The client uses Flash, I don't know how to get it to work.
Maybe they should use HTML5 <video> instead?

[Morpheus]

It is weird, considering closed drivers have a huge shared codebase between sytems, that "beta drivers" are still needed in order to play games. I'm toying with Serious Sam 3, and even with "old" drivers (296 series under windows, 304 under Ubuntu 12.04, both stable), game is still playing good, considering I'm using the publicbeta channel, and seeing there are several fixes on the game side, not drivers. Can I assume that it's the same for other games ?

Considering the package format flamewar, deb, rpm, tgz, whatever it is, and how bad it can be configured, Valve is trying to do the same thing as on windows : be independant of the "admin rights" security, like on windows, and like Chrome (installing in Appdata instead of standard place just to be sure of permanent write permission : it's like installing in /home/user directory, not standard way). It may be the worse thing apart from being a closed software. Package dependancy handling has already been a problem for years between distros, I'm not expecting it to be solved magically just because Steam is coming.

[Morpheus]

The beta has some bugs, I think.

There were some bugs on the input control when registering a new account where the carret in the textbox would insert text in reverse. I.e typing "hello" appeared as "olleh".

The client uses Flash, I don't know how to get it to work.
Maybe they should use HTML5 <video> instead?

Just installs the mozilla version of the plugin, it will use it automatically (need to restart steam after installing it).

I can't get videos launch when downloaded (media section). Need to go to the video folder to launch it manually.

[uid313]

Just installs the mozilla version of the plugin, it will use it automatically (need to restart steam after installing it).

I can't get videos launch when downloaded (media section). Need to go to the video folder to launch it manually.

How do I install the Mozilla version of the plugin?

I downloaded the Flash player .tar.gz file from the Adobe website and unpacked the libflashplayer.so file into ~/.mozilla/plugins/

[Morpheus]

Two ways : through the package manager, or with the adobe website, using the "other system" option.

But your method should have already worked, I think.

[uid313]

Two ways : through the package manager, or with the adobe website, using the "other system" option.

But your method should have already worked, I think.

Oh, I use 64-bit Ubuntu, hence I use 64-bit Firefox and 64-bit Adobe Flash Player.
Steam is 32-bit only?

Hence need to get the 32-bit Adobe Flash Player.
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get...ux.i386.tar.gz

[Hamish Wilson]

Desura uses lots of patched libraries.
Desura isn't isn't packaged and put into the Ubuntu repository.

Your point being?

Desura is of course going to have the advantage of it being free software when it comes to multidistro support though. Not that the original closed client release handled it that badly.

[Thetargos]

Let me jump into the discussion...

I understand the reason why they decided to go with Ubuntu (and hence .deb), as it is the percieved most widely used distribution, and also it is the upstream to a bunch of derivative distributions, even though it might stem from Debian itself. I agree with what others have stated about LSB, and as such I do reckon that "as part of LSB it would make more sense to go RPM", however a few .rpm based distributions have had traditionally differences in how they name their packages, etc... The way I see the package manager and dependency resolution problem would be to instead of relying on the distribution's package manager (apt, yum, etc) to abstract the dependencies to individual files (i.e libstdc++-6.0.so <i686>) and parse them to package-kit which would then use the local package manager to locate the appropriate package to satify said dependency.

Moving towards a more distro/package manager neutral dependency management (the way I understand it, any way) would necessarily go through PackageKit.

As to the "best" way to install Steam, I don't see any problem with it being a self-contained archive installable somewhere in the user's home directory or through package manager, in the end the behavior is the same as say GIMP, Mozilla, wine and other products: Have the core libraries installed system-wide, and locally needed files locally (by means of the currently used ~/.local/share/Steam/ path for Steam), and in such a way even that it could behave like some games in such that in-app updates override the system-wide application version, if say the system package managed version is not in sync with the in-app version. Some games allow this in their /main/directory Vs ~/home/.game directories, making the necessary adjustments in the launcher scripts by use of checks to assess the system Vs user's home directory versions of the components (with 'if' or 'case' statements).

[maligor]

Which formats are good and which are bad?

Is RPM better than .deb?

Having spent some time (professionally) on MeeGo and the rpm system used in it, it seemed to me like the RPM was more susceptible to horrible database corruption than deb is. It could just be that I wasn't experienced in the use of the RPM, but the error messages it produced were definitely not very helpful.

RPM is however simpler to create packages for, aside from some silly staging requirements.

[Morpheus]

Which formats are good and which are bad?

Is RPM better than .deb?

My last touch with RPMs was far back in the days of Mandriva 10.2, since then, I use Debian (mostly servers) and Ubuntu (+derivatives, on clients). So I won't get myself into the argument...