# Steam

Related articles

- Steam/Wine
- Steam/Game-specific troubleshooting

From Wikipedia:

  Steam is a digital distribution, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is used to distribute games and related media online, from small independent developers to larger software houses.

Steam is best known as the platform needed to play Source Engine games (e.g. Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike). Today it offers many games from many other developers.

## Installation

Note:

- Arch Linux is not officially supported.
- Because the Steam client is a 32-bit application, you will need to enable the multilib repository if you have a 64-bit system. It may also make sense to install multilib-devel to provide some important multilib libraries.

Steam can be installed with the package steam, available in the official repositories. If you have a 64-bit system, enable the multilib repository first.

Steam is not supported on this distribution. As such some fixes are needed on the users part to get things functioning properly:

- Steam makes heavy usage of the Arial font. A decent Arial font to use is ttf-liberation or the fonts provided by Steam. Asian languages require wqy-zenhei to display properly.

- If you have a 64-bit system, you will need to install the 32-bit version of your graphics driver (the package in the Multilib Package column) to run 32-bit games.

- If you have a 64-bit system, you will need to install lib32-alsa-plugins to enable sound in 32-bit games.

- Several games have dependencies which may be missing from your system. If a game fails to launch (often without error messages) then make sure all of the libraries listed in Steam/Game-specific troubleshooting are installed.

## Troubleshooting

Note: In addition to being documented here, any bug/fix/error should be, if not already, reported on Valve's bug tracker on their GitHub page.

### The close button only minimizes the window

  Valve GitHub issue 1025

To close the Steam window (and remove it from the taskbar) when you press x, but keep Steam running in the tray, set the environment variable `STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE` to `1`. You can do this by launching Steam using the following command.

    $ STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE=1 steam

If you start steam with the .desktop file, you need to replace the `Exec` with following line:

     Exec=sh -c 'STEAM_FRAME_FORCE_CLOSE=1 steam' %U

### Flash not working on 64-bit systems

  Steam Support article

First ensure lib32-flashplugin is installed. It should be working at this point, if not create a local Steam Flash plugin folder:

    $ mkdir ~/.steam/bin32/plugins/

and set a symbolic link to the global lib32 flash plugin file in your upper new folder

    $ ln -s /usr/lib32/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so ~/.steam/bin32/plugins/

### Text is corrupt or missing

The Steam Support instructions for Windows seem to work on Linux also: Simply download SteamFonts.zip and install them (copying to `/usr/share/fonts/` or `~/.fonts/` works at least).

### SetLocale('en_US.UTF-8') fails at game startup

Uncomment `en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8` in `/etc/locale.gen` and then run `locale-gen` as root.

### The game crashes immediately after start

If your game crashes immediately, try disabling: "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game" in game Properties.

### OpenGL not using direct rendering

  Steam Support article

You have probably not installed your 32-bit graphics driver correctly. See Xorg#Driver installation for which packages to install.

You can check/test if it is installed correctly by installing lib32-mesa-demos and running the following command:

    $ glxinfo32 | grep OpenGL.

### libGL error when running certain games

If you receive an error like the following `Failed to load libGL: undefined symbol: xcb_send_fd`, it could be due to an outdated steam runtime library. Deleting `~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1` will force Steam to load the library version installed by pacman.

### OpenGL GLX context is not using direct rendering, which may cause performance problems.

Steam ships its own versions of some libraries, and they sometimes are too old to work with archlinux system libraries. Removing the library supplied by Steam means Steam has to use the newer arch-specific version. Forum thread.

    rm ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6
    rm ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libgcc_s.so.1

### No audio in certain games

If there is no audio in certain games, and the suggestions provided in Steam/Game-specific troubleshooting do not fix the problem, #Using native runtime may provide a successful workaround.

### You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run: libGL.so.1

You may encounter this error when you launch Steam at first time. Make sure you have installed lib32-version of all your video driver. For example, if you have installed catalyst-utils-pxp, xf86-video-dri, intel-dri, mesa-libgl for AMD and Intel double card, then you should install lib32-catalyst-utils-pxp, lib32-intel-dri, lib32-mesa-libgl.

### Games do not launch on older intel hardware

On older Intel hardware, if the game immediately crashes when run, it may be because your hardware doesn't directly support the latest OpenGL. It appears as a gameoverlayrenderer.so error in /var/dumps/mobile_stdout.txt, but looking in /tmp/gameoverlayrenderer.log it shows a GLXBadFBConfig error.

This can be fixed, however, by forcing the game to use a later version of OpenGL than it wants. Right click on the game, select Properties. Then, click "Set Launch Options" in the "General" tab and paste the following:

    MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.1 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=140 %command%

This will force the game to use the latest version of OpenGL.

### X crashes when Steam starts (Radeon open source driver)

There is a bug in glamor-egl 0.6.0 (used by the open source Radeon driver) which causes X to crash when trying to start Steam. Installing the unofficial glamor-egl-git from AUR is a workaround until a new glamour version is released.

### Some games fail to start

Occationally some games fail to load with output similar to the following:

    ERROR: ld.so: object '~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayrenderer.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32): ignored.

In these cases the included libstdc++.so is conflicting with something explained here. The solution seems to be setting the environmental variable STEAM_RUNTIME to 0, and running the following command:

    rm ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6

## Launching games with custom commands, such as Bumblebee/Primus

Steam has fortunately added support for launching games using your own custom command. To do so, navigate to the Library page, right click on the selected game, click Properties, and Set Launch Options. Steam replaces the tag `%command%` with the command it actually wishes to run. For example, to launch Team Fortress 2 with primusrun and at resolution 1920x1080, you would enter:

    primusrun %command% -w 1920 -h 1080

If you are running the Linux-ck kernel, you may have some success in reducing overall latencies and improving performance by launching the game in SCHED_ISO (low latency, avoid choking CPU) via schedtool

    # schedtool -I -e %command% other arguments

### Killing standalone compositors when launching games

Further to this, utilising the `%command%` switch, you can kill standalone compositors (such as Xcompmgr or Compton) - which can cause lag and tearing in some games on some systems - and relaunch them after the game ends by adding the following to your game's launch options.

     killall compton && %command%; nohup compton &

Replace `compton` in the above command with whatever your compositor is. You can also add -options to `%command%` or `compton`, of course.

Steam will latch on to any processes launched after `%command%` and your Steam status will show as in game. So in this example, we run the compositor through `nohup` so it is not attached to Steam (it will keep running if you close Steam) and follow it with an ampersand so that the line of commands ends, clearing your Steam status.

## Using native runtime

Steam, by default, ships with a copy of every library it uses, packaged within itself, so that games can launch without issue. This can be a resource hog, and the slightly out-of-date libraries they package may be missing important features (Notably, the OpenAL version they ship lacks HRTF and surround71 support). To use your own system libraries, you can run Steam with:

    $ STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam

However, if you're missing any libraries Steam makes use of, this will fail to launch properly. An easy way to find the missing libraries is to run the following commands:

    $ cd ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32
    $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=".:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}" ldd $(file *|sed '/ELF/!d;s/:.*//g')|grep 'not found'|sort|uniq

Note: The libraries will have to be 32-bit, which means you may have to download some from the AUR if on x86_64, such as NetworkManager.

Once you've done this, run steam again with `STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam` and verify it's not loading anything outside of the handful of steam support libraries:

    $ cat /proc/$(pidof steam)/maps|sed '/\.local/!d;s/.*  //g'|sort|uniq

## Skins for Steam

The Steam interface can be fully customized by copying its various interface files in its skins directory and modifying them.

### Steam skin manager

The process of applying a skin to Steam can be greatly simplified using steam-skin-manager from the AUR. The package also comes with a hacked version of the Steam launcher which allows the window manager to draw its borders on the Steam window.

As a result, skins for Steam will come in two flavors, one with and one without window buttons. The skin manager will prompt you whether you use the hacked version or not, and will automatically apply the theme corresponding to your GTK+ theme if it is found. You can of course still apply another skin if you want.

The package ships with two themes for the default Ubuntu themes, Ambiance and Radiance.

## See also

- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Steam

Category:

- Gaming