Right now my new favourite and daily driver desktop is a minimal install of Debian Wheezy (i.e. installing the netinstall from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ with just Openbox and few other choice apps). I will do a guide in the future to setting up this Zen Desktop :-). As pretty much the only games I ever play are CS:GO (CounterStrike GO) & Civ 5 and both of these titles are now available on Steam for Linux, I definitely had to get Steam set-up.
The process to do so isn’t too bad at all and can be broken down into 2 stages:
Nvidia Driver Installation
To start Make sure your Debian software and distribution are up-to-date:
sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
Do not follow the below Nvidia steps instead follow this newer guide
Note you must follow all these steps, otherwise you may well end up in a situation where X won’t start.
Firstly install the linux-headers for your kernel. These are needed to build the driver.
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
Install Nvidia Kernel
sudo apt-get install nvidia-kernel-$(uname -r)
Install Nvidia Driver (accept any popups)
sudo apt-get install nvidia-kernel-dkms
Install nvidia-xconfig to create a new /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (the above removes this file so it is essential that new one is created, see below)
sudo apt-get install nvidia-xconfig
Create a new xorg.conf configuration file which will use the Nvidia Driver
sudo nvidia-xconfig
Reboot and then startx and you should now be using the Nvidia driver.
Installing and setting up Steam
Prequisites
Make sure ‘curl’ is installed, like I said I’m running a minimal install of Wheezy so it wasn’t.
sudo apt-get install curl
Steam requires a 32-Bit library file libGL.so.1 to run… so firstly make sure the whole Nvidia driver install is done. Then enable 32-bit packages for your system.
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
Then update apt-get
sudo apt-get update
Then lastly install the 32-bit component. This should add just one or two packages to your system, if there is a lot more than this stop before installing and make sure you have followed the driver installation guide above.
sudo apt-get install libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386
This could be done after Steam is installed but it’s nice for everything to be ‘right’ when you start it for the first time and fonts will look like a dogs dinner if you don’t do this as your standard login. It will download the steam fonts so they are ready to use by Steam.
cd ~
mkdir .fonts
cd .fonts
wget https://support.steampowered.com/downloads/1974-YFKL-4947/SteamFonts.zip
unzip SteamFonts.zip
Actually installing Steam
Firstly don’t get the Steam Installer from the Steam website. Installing this version will not be straight forward.
Instead go to https://github.com/GhostSquad57/Steam-Installer-for-Wheezy which is rewrite of the Valve installer which makes installing a good bit easier. To install do the following:
cd ~
wget https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82856418/Steam-Installer-For-Wheezy/steam-debian_1.0.0.49-7_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i steam-debian_1.0.0.49-7_all.deb
Follow the on-screen instructions and it should install.
Very lastly, those lovely steam game adverts in Flash won’t work if the 32-Bit version of flash is not installed so..
cd ~
cd .local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/
mkdir plugins
Download the latest 32-Bit tar.gz Flash for linux from here http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/
As of writing the following did the trick after I downloaded the driver with Iceweasel
cp ~/Downloads/install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz ./
tar -xzf install_flash_player_11_linux.i386.tar.gz
Done, if all is well (and it should be if you’re running Debian Wheezy 7.8 64-Bit with recent Nvidia card) you should have Steam ready to use on your minimal Debian set-up. Please comment if you have anything to add or have any issues. Hope this helps you.