Valve has released a new major SteamOS update

Oct 23, 2014 14:17 GMT  ·  By

Valve has published a new update for SteamOS, this time of the stable branch of the distribution. It's a consistent update and it should provide some interesting changes to the community.

The two supported branches of SteamOS, stable and Beta, are now identical and they will remain the same until the next update is made for the Beta branch. The version launched today gathers many changes and improvements that were originally available in the devel distro. Many of them are just package updates, but there are a few new features as well.

The SteamOS community is growing bigger and it looks like it’s got more users in the past few months. Linux fans have been asking the Valve devs to get some packages in the repositories and they just got their wish. The operating system is not quite ready to be employed as a regular OS that can be used every day for other purposes than gaming, but it's getting there.

SteamOS Update 145 is an important release

As you all know, SteamOS is based on Debian unstable and lots of packages have been imported from upstream. Valve devs didn't just add libraries from Debian, they also made a few important contributions of their own. For example, a custom graphics compositor built to offer a seamless transition between Steam, its games, and the SteamOS system overlay is also present in the distro.

Interestingly enough, even if SteamOS doesn't boot into a desktop by default, it that doesn't mean that it can't be done. "To access the SteamOS desktop, it must be enabled from the Steam Settings menu. Select Settings (the gear icon in the top right) then select Interface and check the "Enable access to the Linux desktop" box. Now the Exit button will have an additional option, 'Return to Desktop' that will switch to the SteamOS desktop," reads the FAQ.

"SteamOS comes with two predefined accounts. The first is 'steam' and it is the account where Steam and all its games run. This is a non-privileged account. The second account is 'desktop' and this is where the SteamOS desktop and any non-Steam applications run. This account can use 'sudo' to gain administrative privileges after you set a password for it."

Besides some updated packages that have been added (e2fsprogs, geoclue, libdrm, nspr, nss, plymouth, and plymouth-themes-steamos), the developers have also updated the Linux kernel to get support for DualShock 3 and 4 controllers, a bug that was affecting Planetary Annihilation has been fixed, numerous security updates have been pulled from the Debian repos, some new packages have been added (File Roller, Nautilus, python 2.6, and a few others), and the distro now has support for Google Chrome.

You can download the latest version of SteamOS from Softpedia.