Installing 50 Steam Games on Linux (Live Blog) (deleted)

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buckybit

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Edited By buckybit

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EXTomar

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#1  Edited By EXTomar

I didn't notice Dota 2 release a Mac and Linux client along with the official release. I've actually played Team Fortres 2 on Linux (for a hat!) and it behaved more or less like I would expect it too.

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ThunderSlash

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As someone who tried out the Steam Linux beta, I found that display drivers were perhaps the toughest things to install. Especially if your GPU is an obscure laptop one. It didn't help that Ubuntu 12 didn't like my hardware for whatever reason. I had to install it up to 5 times. Also, most of the games were pretty buggy from my experience.

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EXTomar

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#3  Edited By EXTomar

Any drivers like video have classically been tricky to handle because ATI and Nvidia want to tightly control and guard their hardware and software tech. The best Canonical can do is take the binary ATI and Nvidia provides test it and release it "as is". Intel is the only major graphics vendor that does true open source drivers and unsurprisingly stupidly easy to use.

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mitchell486

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As someone who runs Ubuntu 12.04 on my work laptop and wants to really consider strongly ditching Windows at home.... This is awesome. Please keep this up and I will definitely be a follower. You have already opened my eyes to a number of games on Linux. If they keep going in this direction, I'll be leaving Windows to play on Linux primarily! Thanks!

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winsord

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#7  Edited By winsord

Pretty interesting read, definitely will be keeping tabs on this thread. I'm likely going to make a partition for Kubuntu or Fedora partition on the next HDD I buy, and I'd be interested to see how much of my library has Linux support. I'd messed around with doing a Wubi install of Kubuntu before, but I never ended up getting past Windows Boot Manager throwing a fit every time I went to launch because of the weird path I wanted. I figure I'd be better off just partitioning 250GB or so from a new 2TB drive anyways, so it'll get done in time.

Type: ps -A and find the Anomaly game. Look at the ID number and then type: kill <number> (<number> means, you put the number in, do not actually type <number>. For example: kill 12479

Admittedly I've got no experience with Ubuntu and have really only spent time in the RHEL systems, but wouldn't it be easier in most cases to run something more akin to: "ps aux | grep -i 'anomaly' ", or even to replace ps with top and use its built in kill function? I remember Ubuntu handling root user access oddly the last time I used it, so it wouldn't surprise me if you're doing it the way you are with good reason. That said, the "u" switch should tell you the user that's running the process, and seeing as you should be running games from a standard user account and not root, you shouldn't need to su or sudo to kill the game. I also wonder if you could get away with a lower severity signal than 15/term too, though it shouldn't really matter. It wouldn't surprise me if you just used ps -A for the example, seeing as it'd be an easier command for someone new to Linux to remember than bothering with piping into grep.

Now I'm probably going to go home and start messing about with Wubi again, haha.

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Ben_H

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#8  Edited By Ben_H

For your last part where you talk about processes:

Would you not be able to look up a game process simply using "ps acx" (ps -a works too, I just like more info whenever possible) and not have to allow superuser access? I kill processes all the time on both Linux and OS X without ever needing to set myself as superuser. That just seems like an unnecessary extra step. And it is better to be not set as superuser so you don't accidentally screw something up. I almost never use sudo other than for installing stuff and other very specific things, though I normally just use the terminal for programming stuff (run Emacs in one tab, a terminal set to the needed directory on another tab). Basically what I am saying is you don't need superuser to kill processes.

pro tip: to find processes faster use " ps acx | grep [processnamehere]". It gives you only the process you are looking for rather than all of the running processes. Better yet, if you know the exact process name, simply use "pgrep [processnamehere]" and it simply returns the process ID number (it is case sensitive, though), so you can kill processes without ever having to look for anything. Much faster than digging through every process to find what you are looking for. Also, if you aren't sure of the exact process name, grep allows you to put in partial names and returns everything that matches that string of characters. For example, if you search "ps acx | grep Chrome" it will return not only the Chrome process (and other related processes, like ChromeHelper, and one I kill a lot because it sets off my discrete GPU, ChromeHelper EH), but the processes for each tab, so you can kill an individual tab if it is giving you trouble. Very handy.

edit: Winsord said some of the same stuff I did hahaha. Anyhow, he might be right about Ubuntu handling root access funny, I'm not sure. I haven't used Ubuntu since it switched away from Gnome as the desktop environment. I've been mostly using OpenSUSE and more recently elementary OS.

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jeffrud

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I started reviewing the Linux versions of some games a few months back, really been meaning to get back into it. I was a beta client fellow with two or three years of distro hopping under my belt, and so far my experiences have been pretty good. You wind up browsing a lot of forums for specific issues (I wind up having to run all Source games with -windowed -noborder), and I still wouldn't recommend it to folks not willing to get their hands a little dirty. Overall though, for the price of $0 you've got access to a fully functional OS and two outstanding games.

Hope you keep this project up!

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fapa

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@buckybit nice write up so far. If you are going for as simple as possible why not use System Monitor to kill the process. Everybody that ever used Windows Task Manager will feel right at home.

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Thanks to my quite big Steam library I own 70 titles on Linux and so far most of them worked pretty well. There are some hitches every now and then but I would say its on par with a Win7/Win8 x64 install. I especially had trouble getting some older games to run on Win8.

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bigjeffrey

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LOL Linux

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oraknabo

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#16  Edited By oraknabo

I blame the video driver issues you were having during setup more on the card manufacturers than Ubuntu. That said, I abandoned Ubuntu over a year ago for Manjaro which set up really easily and gave me no issues with drivers or installing Steam. I also have an Arch system I've built up from scratch I use daily now too, but I haven't yet tried Steam on it.

I was on it during the beta and 3D games like Amnesia and TF2 actually ran better on the Manjaro side than on the Win7 side on the same computer. It looks like there's a pretty good library building up. There were less than 20 games last time I was on it on Linux, so I need to look again and see what's on my games list that's become available since.

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Brackynews

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#17  Edited By Brackynews

Trying to put beta ATI drivers on my OSX Bootcamp installation was 120 minutes of my life last night that I'll never get back. I try not to do this shit any more, I have better things to worry about.

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EXTomar

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ATI drivers are notoriously iffy for Linux unfortunately.

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Bollard

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As someone who tried out the Steam Linux beta, I found that display drivers were perhaps the toughest things to install. Especially if your GPU is an obscure laptop one. It didn't help that Ubuntu 12 didn't like my hardware for whatever reason. I had to install it up to 5 times. Also, most of the games were pretty buggy from my experience.

Yeah, I had 11 and upgraded to 12 and it was like, nope you don't get USB drivers anymore. Also your hard drive is failing. And my hard drive is fine. Had to revert to 11 to even get it to work again and it still kept making the partition read only during use. I gave up in the end. Really doesn't like my PC hardware.