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Steam logo

Steam is a proprietary content delivery and management application for PC software with GNU/Linux support. It is packaged for Debian in non-free

Graphics

Some games will run fine with your current set up, others may require updated drivers to get the best performance, and a few may refuse to run without the driver updates. Determine what graphics hardware you are using and follow the appropriate section for AMD graphics or NVIDIA graphics.

Preparation

User permissions

You must be sure that the regular user that will run steam games is at least at groups "video" and "audio".

#usermod -a -G video,audio second_user

Debian has a security approach that all is forbidden unless sysadmin explicitly allows. This schema is managed by "task" groups. The very first regular user created during installation is included in groups "video", "audio", "cdrom", "scanner", and so on. The next users created are not included at any special group. This way, next created users will not be able to execute steam. It fails with weird messages regarding "X bad number out of range." You must have to include them explicitly with commands or users management GUIs like kuser.

Installation

There are packages available for Debian 8 "Jessie", Stretch and Sid.

Packages are not currently available for Debian 7 "Wheezy". If you want to run Steam on a Wheezy system, you would need to either build a jessie chroot (look at schroot for this) or upgrade to Jessie first.

64-bit systems (amd64)

/!\ Instructions are for Jessie and Sid systems only. Do not do this on Wheezy or you will break your system.

  1. Add a "non-free" component to /etc/apt/sources.list, for example:

    # Debian Jessie
    deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
  2. Enable Multi-Arch and update the list of available packages:

    # dpkg --add-architecture i386
    # aptitude update
  3. Install the steam package:

    # aptitude install steam
  4. Install 32-bit OpenGL libraries:

/!\ Installing the 32-bit OpenGL libraries may uninstall the 64-bit drivers you may have previously installed. Installing the AMD graphics or NVIDIA graphics drivers for your system is recommended. The appropriate OpenGL library will be installed along with those drivers.

32-bit systems (i386)

/!\ Instructions are for Jessie and Sid systems only. Do not do this on Wheezy or you will break your system.

  1. Add a "non-free" component to /etc/apt/sources.list, for example:

    # Debian Jessie 
    deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
  2. Update the list of available packages and install the steam package:

    # aptitude update
    # aptitude install steam

Troubleshooting

Steam runtime issues

Upstream ?GitHub issue tracker

Steam ships with its own versions of some libraries (the "Steam Runtime") in an attempt to emulate the Ubuntu 12.04 environment in later versions of Ubuntu.

However, some core libraries included in the Steam Runtime will often conflict with the newer versions of other libraries included in Debian (such as drivers, and specifically the open-source ATI driver).

You can work around this by deleting the Steam Runtime versions of these libraries, forcing Steam to fall back to the up-to-date system versions (the ones installed by apt-get).

Note that Steam will frequently re-install these runtime libraries when Steam is updated, so until ValveSoftware/steam-runtime#13(https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/issues/13) is resolved, whenever Steam updates, you should exit, remove the libraries, and restart it again.

Run these commands to remove runtime libraries known to cause issues with Debian:

Examples of issues / error messages known to occur if these libraries are present:

If you find yourself at this Steam page then likely removing the above files will sort this problem

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9938-EYZB-7457

No sound in games

You need to remove alsa-lib and libasound.so.* in ~/.steam/steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ ~/.steam/steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

so:

See also


CategoryGame