Alright, this is by far a non Free Software, but this is also the very best way that will push more people to Free Desktops and therefore to Free Software. I strongly believe that some software categories, or certain Applications is perfectly okay to stay proprietary, and one of these categories are games.
I tried today Steam under Fedora 18 and also I bought, installed and played Trine2!
Installation
Of course Fedora doesn’t ship it in their default repos (everyone was expecting for it, but Fedora still denies it) so we need a bit more work. Thanks to Satya you can easily get Steam through Fedora Utils. If you don’t have it you can easily install it.
$ sudo yum install fedorautils
You will find Steam in additional software and you can install it with a single click. Alternatively you can manually add the repo.
$ sudo gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/steam.repo
and add:
[steam] name=Steam RPM packages and dependencies baseurl=http://spot.fedorapeople.org/steam/fedora-$releasever/ enabled=1 skip_if_unavailable=1 gpgcheck=0
Then install it
$ sudo yum install steam
Installation is around 80MB and after you launch it for first time it will ask you another 200MB for update. Steam needs also an account in order to use it, but you can create one through the SteamApp interface, so there is no need to go in their page. However in order to buy a game you need to verify your account by clicking the verification link in the email that Steam will send.
Requirements
- 1 GHz Pentium 4 or AMD Opteron with 512 megabytes of RAM and 5 gigabytes of hard drive space, or better
- Internet connection (Cable/DSL speeds recommended)
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, fully updated (sure!)
- Latest graphics driver
- NVidia driver support – For recent cards (e.g. series 8), you will need to install 310.x. For older cards, driver 304.x supports the NVidia 6 and 7 GPU series.
- AMD driver support – For recent cards (e.g. series 5 and above), we recommend installing the 12.11 driver. For older cards, Catalyst 13.1 Legacy supports the HD 2400 Pro card and is the latest for the 2 and 4 GPU series.
- Intel HD 3000/4000 driver support – you will need to use the latest Mesa drivers, Mesa 9 or later.
Buy Games
You can pay with all common ways, Paypal, Visa, Master etc and the prices are quite good as part of discounts that last till 21 of February. I bought Trine 2 for 3.74 euros.
Steam suffers from many bugs but they are closing them fast enough. One of them is that you can’t use the interface in Full Screen and if you press “Big Picture”, Steam will crash. That doesn’t affect the games that you can still play full screen. In any case, if you have any kind of bug you should check for it in their GitHub.
nVidia in 64bit
Some games need 32bit drivers. In case you are missing the 32bit libraries the games won’t start without display any error. If you are using akmod/kmod from RPM Fusion you need also to install
$ sudo yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686
That applies for cards GeForce 8 and newer. For older cards please check on
http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia
Not a clue what happens with the ATI/AMD ones.
Legacy Icons
Steam has the classic bug of many applications that don’t support GNOME 3 Notification Icons, like Dropbox. As a workaround you can use the “Top Icons” Extension”. This will display all Lecacy Icons in Top Panel.
Trine 2
I will go into a very detailed review.. Trine2 is just the best Platform Game I ever played! Review over :)
And she is my favorite character!
Sorry of the weird intro, but every time we refer some non-free software the discussions goes to.. Sometimes to help something you need to make compromises and this is a golden rule in every aspect of our life. From politics of our governments to the personal relations between couples. So I hope to don’t run into Free/Non Free comments :)