Setting up SteamOS
On Tuesday, I took the plunge and setup SteamOS beta on my HTPC - dual booting into Windows
I had to use the ISO, as my mainboard doesn’t appear to support UEFI. It is a faily old beast.
Processor: Intel Duo Memory: xGB Hard Drive: 40GB space allocated Video Card: AMD RADEON Joystick: XBOX 360 controller
Although, my main goal was to Steam Stream games from my desktop, which has way more power behind it.
The installation did run smoothly, nice hints of debian. I did have to run an expert install so I could dual boot. I was running Ubuntu on the drive, but I had to make sure it reformatted the partition
I did run into a few problems, after installation though, which is understandable since SteamOS is -in beta-.
Black screen after installation
It looks like the Radeon card doesn’t work straight out of “the box”
I had to follow these steps in order to get the video card working, from Reddit Working suggestions for black screen after
After getting that all sorted, the next problem I ran into
Network problems
I had some interesting networking problems. My RealTech network card was not installed by default. I had to insmod the device, then manually setup the network card.
It began to install Steam, and in the Steam installation, the network card lost connectivity, for some odd reason, I had to fix it in the network manager conf file, and set it to managed. From AskUbuntu
$ sudo nano /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and set managed to true
Steam began to continue the installation after that.
In-house streaming world problems
I had a problem with In-house streaming. It appears that having VirtualBox installed messes with the network metric[4]
Workaround -
- Open up Network and Sharing Center
- Click ‘Change Adapter Settings’
- Right click ‘VirtualBox Host-Only Network’, go to Properties
- Double click “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)‘under ’This connection uses the following items’.
- In the Properties page, click ”Advanced…"
- In the “Advanced TCP/IP Settings”, tab “IP Settings”, uncheck the box marked “Automatic Metic” and type in 800 or higher.
OK all dialogs and run whatever software could not Recieve multicast.
The problem stems from Microsoft assigning interface Metrics based on the driver’s own reported Link speed in Windows 7. Since that’s all 1GB, there is a clash on metric. From VirtualBox tickets
Installing XBMC
I didn’t bother installing XBMC, because it doesn’t support hardware rendering on my Radeon, but it should work fine if you have a nVidia based video card.