SteamOS for HTPC/gaming computer -W.I.P.

I thought about that, so I tried cutting the 2500 k down to one core and it still wouldn't boot with any card installed.

I'm interested to see how your 750 does in Linux versus windows. I have an Ubuntu box with an AMD HD6870 that I have been gaming on a little. The AMD drivers have come a long way recently. When I first tried gaming about a year or more ago, it was barely playable and MSAA was broken.

Now, the valve games are very playable, even with MSAA and I am within 10%-20% of my win7 performance depending on whether MSAA is on or not (seems to take a bigger hit under Linux). I have also tried Trine2 which has been playable but not as smooth as Win7, Serious Sam 3 which was decently playable but only at severely reduced settings, and a bunch of indie's that all work fine. I have found that the latest AMD drivers work better with a kernel of 3.12.x and above as well. Anyway, interested to see what your experience is like.

I received the new motherboard, but as I was loading the os onto my usb drive, I had a catastrophic meltdown in my main rig.
I ended up toasting an x79 board and a stick of memory (at least.) I wasn't even benching it....
I had put in some ram the other day that was slightly questionable, but it seemed ok. Full load mining on 2 gpus and cpu, plus copying files must have pushed it past it's limits. I had to move the cpu over to my main rig for temporary duty, until I get my new rampage black and get the upgrades to the watercooling finished. It should be this week. Hopefully the 4930k is ok or it will be another while to rma that. Perhaps I will pick up a cheapy 1155 cpu to get it going sooner.

As far as the steamos install, I am thinking that I may change over to ubuntu, then add on the steam client. That way it would be easier to add on all of my other wants as well. Perhaps add on myth too.

xsuperbgx said:

I received the new motherboard, but as I was loading the os onto my usb drive, I had a catastrophic meltdown in my main rig.
I ended up toasting an x79 board and a stick of memory (at least.) I wasn't even benching it....
I had put in some ram the other day that was slightly questionable, but it seemed ok. Full load mining on 2 gpus and cpu, plus copying files must have pushed it past it's limits. I had to move the cpu over to my main rig for temporary duty, until I get my new rampage black and get the upgrades to the watercooling finished. It should be this week. Hopefully the 4930k is ok or it will be another while to rma that. Perhaps I will pick up a cheapy 1155 cpu to get it going sooner.

As far as the steamos install, I am thinking that I may change over to ubuntu, then add on the steam client. That way it would be easier to add on all of my other wants as well. Perhaps add on myth too.

Click to expand...

Man that really really sucks... if you need help with a combo from microcenter or something I live 5 minutes away from one...

I already ordered a new one, thanks for the offer.

]-[itman said:

I'm interested to see how your 750 does in Linux versus windows. I have an Ubuntu box with an AMD HD6870 that I have been gaming on a little. The AMD drivers have come a long way recently. When I first tried gaming about a year or more ago, it was barely playable and MSAA was broken.

Now, the valve games are very playable, even with MSAA and I am within 10%-20% of my win7 performance depending on whether MSAA is on or not (seems to take a bigger hit under Linux). I have also tried Trine2 which has been playable but not as smooth as Win7, Serious Sam 3 which was decently playable but only at severely reduced settings, and a bunch of indie's that all work fine. I have found that the latest AMD drivers work better with a kernel of 3.12.x and above as well. Anyway, interested to see what your experience is like.

Click to expand...

Valve found that under some conditions at least, linux is faster than Windows.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

Ya with Nvidia, ATI drivers are still way behind

doublejack said:

Valve found that under some conditions at least, linux is faster than Windows.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

Click to expand...

Yep, I was aware of their tests, but was looking for a bit of a broader sample and maybe some personal, user experience. After this thread I hopped over to phoronix.com to see if they had anything and they recently did a bunch of linux gaming tests. Their linux vs. Win8 test on an nVidia card showed Win8 to still be the overall winner, but many cases were pretty much even and linux even took a couple small victories. Some of the Win8 victories were pretty big though. Just hoping to see what someone else's experience was as well.

Stratus_ss said:

Ya with Nvidia, ATI drivers are still way behind

Click to expand...

I don't doubt Nvidia still has better all around drivers, but like I said, AMD has made a ton of improvements lately. I'd say AMD's VLIW cards perform just about as you'd expect them to against their nVidia counterparts, maybe just slightly slower. The biggest thing for AMD drivers in linux is the bad performance of GCN 1.1 cards. I don't really care about that as I don't own a GCN card, but hopefully they get that fixed sooner than later.

Note: I am on Ubuntu 12.04 with a recent kernel. From what I've seen, more recent versions of Ubuntu give a significant performance boost for AMD cards (probably nvidia too, was looking for AMD results though). I will update once the new LTS release comes out in April and see if I get a boost.

doublejack said:

Valve found that under some conditions at least, linux is faster than Windows.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

Click to expand...

Wasn't AMD pushing for more OpenGL game development? Would like to see that same game benched in Windows with OpenGL drivers. (I know at one point AMD even offered separate OpenGL enhanced drivers.

I did not have a nvidia card at that time, so not sure if nVidia does or not (I am sure they do, but I don't have First hand knowledge of it).

Yes, that is correct. ATI has been a proponent of OpenGL on Windows for a while. I'm specifically thinking back to 2010 or so when they were pushing it as an alternative to DX11.

I can't believe how much of this guide no longer works. Less than 2 months since I first did it.
new install method added to first post.

Here is the method I used to install pepperflash into chromium. The way in the first post no longer works.
http://debian-bits-and-snips.blogspot.com/2013/07/install-pepperflash-in-chromium.html

I am finally working on installing this now with the new gpu. I tried to do a ubuntu install and put all of this stuff in, but I felt like it was a step back in what I was looking for. I erased my previous steamos install, so now I have to re-do it all. I will update the first post as I redo it.

This is one of my biggest gripes about linux. Every time you find a guide to do something it is obsolete and no longer works. Why would they remove the pepperflashplugin from the deb sources? I haven't gone any further yet.

pipelight/silverlight install still works as described in first post.

I built a linux box with AMD graphics specifically to test out drivers on demanding games. The 13.12 driver indeed has come a long way compared to what was out there. Portal, Portal 2 beta and Serious Sam BFE all run very well now for me!

mednafen emulator works and can be installed from the debian repositories. I just dont know how to get my sound to work. I figured out how to configure controller in game. (F1)

I found these instructions to use xbmc and steam together. You can operate this with only the xbox controller to watch your movies or play games on steam. Too bad there aren't more linux games that use controller.

I integrated XBMC with SteamOS using these instructions.

Type the following commands:

sudo su
cd /usr/share/xsessions/
mv gnome.desktop gnome-old.desktop
cp XBMC.desktop gnome.desktop
You can now reboot the computer. After SteamOS has launched, select “Exit” and “Return to Desktop” to launch XBMC. You can then return back to Steam by selecting “Exit” in the XBMC.

You can restore the original desktop back by typing the following in the terminal:

sudo su
cd /usr/share/xsessions/
rm gnome.desktop
mv gnome-old.desktop gnome.desktop

Click to expand...

Instructions were found here: http://mymediaexperience.com/performance-htpc-guide/

Looks like steam has enabled the streaming your games from one computer to another: http://store.steampowered.com/streaming/

It looks like I should be able to stream from my main rig to my htpc. I haven't read up on the details yet. Like performance or hardware requirements, etc. I will try it out and report back.

I have read that this works really really well for a wired network. From a great powered PC to a dumpy one. I also havent tried this but may in the future

I tried it out shortly and was impressed. I had it stream to my laptop running Gentoo over wireless. RO2 worked fine. BioShock Infinite was kinda choppy.

I was frusterated though with getting it to work my firewall config. It says on the steam help page that you need 27036 open, which I had opened and the windows box could see the Linux client. But I had no option to stream on the Linux box. After looking through the logs, it looks like the client tries to listen on a random port. The only way I could get it to work was by telling iptables to accept all connections from the ip address of my windows box. If someone knows a better way to do it or I'm wrong please correct me.

I was curious as to what is XBMC and found out that the team responsible for creating/maintaining it, have released a Ubuntu distro with XMBC as it's interface? it is called aptly enough "XBMCubuntu"

I think I would preffer to add XBMC to an existing distro than go that route, but it would make things simpler if you want an HTPC that mostly works out of the box for a media only pc.

DocClock aka MadClocker said:

I was curious as to what is XBMC and found out that the team responsible for creating/maintaining it, have released a Ubuntu distro with XMBC as it's interface? it is called aptly enough "XBMCubuntu"

I think I would preffer to add XBMC to an existing distro than go that route, but it would make things simpler if you want an HTPC that mostly works out of the box for a media only pc.

Click to expand...

I love XBMC. I have been using it for at least 5 years, if not longer. I always add it, I have used the pre-baked XBMC os, but its pretty minimal so its really only for specific use cases