[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

Steam

Steam is a digital distribution platform developed by Valve Corporation offering digital rights management (DRM), multiplayer gaming and social networking services.

Installation

Note

Steam requires multilib if using a 64 bit system.

The steam installer can be be had by installing the steamclient package from AlienBob. On running Steam the first time it downloads some libraries and and sets itself up.

Troubleshooting

Sound does not work (pulseaudio)

Slackware-14.2 switched to pulseaudio; if pulseaudio is not working as expected sound may not work in steam. The following fix could be tried if sound is not working:

# mv /var/lib/dbus/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id.bak
# ln -s /etc/machine-id /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

Source: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1179#issuecomment-26445442

Glitch in graphics

Steam (and games) may require certain libraries for functioning correctly, like OpenAL and libtxc_dxtn (for multilib the compat32 versions would need to be installed as well).

Controller does not work

You may need to map the controller buttons by going to Steam Big Picture mode → Settings → Controllers.

Source: http://steamcommunity.com/app/238460/discussions/1/540741858956217983/?ctp=2#c540741859210052192

Further reading

Sources

 howtos:multimedia:steam ()