SteamOS 2.67 Beta now ready for public testing

Mar 25, 2016 00:30 GMT  ·  By

Just a few minutes ago, Valve pushed version 2.67 of its Debian-based SteamOS Linux operating system for gamers to the Brewmaster Beta channel for early adopters and public beta testers.

According to the release notes, SteamOS 2.67 Beta appears to be mostly a bugfix release that updates many of the internal components of the Linux kernel-based operating systems, which Valve used on its awesome Steam Machines gaming rigs.

However, one thing caught out attention, an update to the built-in PulseAudio sound server, which adds better support for profiles that change their availability when HDMI EDL (EDID like Data) changes are being detected.

"Some pulseaudio changes to better handle profiles which change availability when the HDMI ELD changes. Please let us know if you see any regressions in the audio output selection interface," reads today's announcement.

HDMI/DP is now preferred over other types of displays

A patch to the steamos-compositor component makes it possible to select the HDMI/DP connection over other types of displays, the GRUB bootloader has been updated to reduce screen flashing during boot, and the steamos-modeswitch-inhibitor has been patched to fix a bug that prevented The Talos Principle game to start.

Additionally, there's now a toggle for Alienware Deep Sleep in the control script. Among the packages that have been updated in SteamOS 2.67 Beta, we can mention Git, Bind9, Debian Installer (the kernel ABI has been updated to version 25), Iceweasel, Jasper, Perl, and Samba.

You can download the installable-only ISO images of SteamOS 2.67 Beta right now from our website, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, and it might contain bugs. Also, note that the ISO images are not live, so you'll need to install them on your computer to test them.