THE STEAM RUNTIME

While perusing the Steam Store you might notice that titles only specify support for Ubuntu 12.04 in their system requirements. This might seem a little odd, in an age where we’re always telling you to get the latest things, and the Steam client itself updates itself on a daily basis. Don’t worry – there’s no need to go hunting out an LXFDVD

from seven years ago, as games do work on newer distros.

But things are like this for a reason. The Steam runtime – the set of libraries which games (and the Steam client itself) use to interface with the rest of the system – is still based on the library versions that shipped with that ancient version of Ubuntu. It includes a lot of 32-bit libraries, but let’s not get into that.

You don’t have to use these libraries, and indeed Arch Linux and other distributions no longer support using the bundled runtime. Much newer versions of the relevant libraries are available in the repos, after all. If you want to do similar, you can start Steam from the command line as follows:

$ STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam

Naturally, you’ll need the modern equivalents of libraries provided by the Steam runtime. A list of the packages required on Debianbased distros can be found at http://bit.ly/lxf250steam. Some newer libraries are entirely incompatible with Steam, and these will need to be bypassed via the LD_PRELOAD environment variable (see the steam-runtime script in Arch Linux to see how this works). Alternatively, check out the section on the Linux Steam Integration tool in the main text.