Tagged as: Steam

Update: Spot has a Steam yum repository set up. Download steam.repo to your /etc/yum.repos.d directory, and then yum install steam. When I originally wrote this post, Spot's steam repo was gone (that link gave a 404).

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Just a quick post about how to install the Steam for Linux client on 64-bit Fedora Linux.

This works for Fedora 17 x64. I'm not sure it will work in Fedora 18 or later versions when they come out, but I'll probably test that at some point too and update this post.

NOTE: It should go without saying, but the terminal commands I list below begin with a $ sign -- you don't type this symbol. That represents your prompt. So when it says "$ yum install ..." you just type "yum install ..."

1. Download the steam.deb Ubuntu package (currently, Steam only officially supports Ubuntu 12.04) - link that works as of the time of this writing.
2. Open the .deb in an archive manager, such as Gnome's file-roller. Extract data.tar.gz from the .deb file.
3. Extract data.tar.gz somewhere like ~/steam - put it in an empty folder, so after extracting, this folder will only contain the directories "etc" and "usr"
4. In a terminal, switch to the directory you extracted data.tar.gz to, and run:
   $ sudo cp -r * /
   Alternatively, open a file manager like Nautilus as the root user if you'd prefer to do a copy/paste visually.
5. You'll also have to install the 32-bit versions of some libraries that Steam depends on. Run this command in a terminal:
   $ sudo yum -y install libpng.i686 libpng-compat.i686 gtk2.i686
6. Run Steam either by the steam command in your terminal, or via your application menu.

And it should work. You will probably also need to install 32-bit support libraries for your video card, for example xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686 for recent NVIDIA video cards (assuming of course you're using kmod-nvidia and not the default nouveau drivers!). You're on your own here though, but this Crossover Wiki page may help.

Problems?

If you get an error that says "Failed to load steamui.so", this will be caused by missing dependency errors. Steam will need the 32-bit versions of some libraries it depends on, which don't get installed by default in a 64-bit Fedora OS. Re-read the steps above and make sure you installed the 32-bit versions of libpng, libpng-compat, and gtk2. If they're all installed, it may be another library (I personally only had to install the three listed). The general procedure to track down missing libraries in Linux is as follows:

1. In a terminal, navigate to Steam's library folder, which (as of right now) should be in $HOME/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32
2. Run this command to list the missing library dependencies for steamui.so:
   env LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" ldd steamui.so | grep "not found"
3. If this command shows no results, this means there are no missing libraries and everything should be working. If it does list results, continue reading.
4. For example, if it says "libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0 => not found", run this command to identify the package in Fedora that provides that file:
   yum provides '*/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0'
5. This will list packages like gtk2-2.24.10-1.fc17.i686 : The GIMP Toolkit (GTK+), a library for creating GUIs for X (there will also be a ".x86_64" version, but we don't care about those because we need the 32-bit libraries).
6. Ignore the version number part of the package and just sudo yum install gtk2.i686 -- make sure to include the .i686 part, otherwise Fedora will just assume you want 64-bit because it matches your current architecture.

Good luck!