Steam For Linux Now Available To All Users

Valve has just announced that Steam for Linux (beta) is now available to all Steam users, just in time for the Steam Winter sale which starts today:

The Steam for Linux beta client is now available to all Steam users, so if you've been patiently waiting for an invitation to join us, consider yourself officially invited!

With a growing catalog of Linux-supported games, an active Steam for Linux community group, and a new GitHub bug reporting repository, the timing’s right to jump in and share your feedback.

If you've already downloaded and installed Steam for Linux beta, you should redownload and install the latest deb available on its website, because Steam now has its own Ubuntu repository that's going to be used for updates. Well, at least in theory, because as soon as I've installed the new deb and launched Steam, it started to download an update through the client.

Supported games include Serious Sam 3: BFE, Team Fortress 2, Killing Floor and others. For a list of games supported by Steam for Linux, see THIS page.

In other Steam-related news, a recent Steam client update brought Joystick hotplug and multi-monitor support. Oh, and the Steam Skin Manager about which we've written a few days ago, has added an option to use native window borders for Steam (screenshot above).

Download Steam for Linux

Ubuntu / Debian / Linux Mint, etc.: Download Steam for Linux beta (deb). The deb is for 32bit but it works on 64bit because Ubuntu supports multi-arch.

The Steam download page should automatically detect your OS and offer a deb file for download but in case that doesn't work properly, here's a direct Steam deb download link.

If you can't install Steam using Ubuntu Software Center, place the Steam deb file in your home directory, open a terminal and copy/paste the following command:

sudo dpkg -i steam_latest.deb

The GPG key for the Steam Ubuntu repository isn't added when installing the deb package, so you might get an error like the one below when running an update:

W: GPG error: http://repo.steampowered.com precise InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY F24AEA9FB05498B7

To fix this, run the following commands in a terminal:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys F24AEA9FB05498B7
sudo apt-get update

Also see the getting started with Steam instructions @ Ubuntu wiki.

If you get a dependency error when trying to install the Steam deb in Debian, try THIS.

While Steam is officially supported only on Ubuntu, it can be installed in other Linux distributions such as Arch Linux, Fedora, Fuduntu, Gentoo and others:

- Arch Linux: Steam is available in AUR.

- Fuduntu: install Steam using: "beesu yum install steam".

- Gentoo: instructions for installing Steam, HERE.

- openSUSE, Fedora and Mandriva users can grab Steam rpm (there are also Fedora packages) from HERE.