SteamOS: My SteamMachine

This is part of a series of posts where I put down what I did while playing around with SteamOS.

As soon as I got back from my vacation I needed to try out Steams Linux based OS that runs on their new SteamMachines. Everybody is supposed to be able to build their own SteamMachine, when this leaves beta. But you can try it out already, if you aren’t afraid and have some spare hardware lying around (or want to use Ye Olde SteamOSe on VirtualBox or VMWare.) I had spare parts of an old computer left over, mostly bought about 4-5 years ago, and it still works great on most games. It was running with Windows and Steam before and now dual boots SteamOS as well:

Mainboard: Asus P5Q-PRO
CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E8400 (3.00GHz)
Memory: 4GB RAM
Graphics: NVidia Geforce GTX 260 (~1GB)
Hard drive: 2TB HDD

I installed SteamOS on my old hardware via Ye Olde SteamOSe, since I wanted to dual boot Windows and I don’t have an UEFI bios yet. Simply following the instructions to create an installer and run the power installer I got a so far working installation, where I could login with the user steam (password steam) and have a nice BigPicture mode that used my Xbox controller out of the box. But there are still a few kinks to work out and I’ll try and post about them in my steam category.

Warning: Don’t try this if the computer or the data on it is important to you! This is still deep in beta mode and if you don’t know your way around Linux, you might fail miserably. 🙂

Here are a few more screenshots for you to check out. It’s mostly whats known of BigPicture, but might be still interesting.