Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and today I'm here with the steamos tutorial and demo it's totally possible to build yourself a steam machine right now however this is the very first release so it's a bit complicated as far as the install goes and still lacking a few major features like game streaming first of all you'll need compatible hardware in your PC as of now this means a system with an Nvidia graphics card and a fairly recent motherboard that supports UEFI boot steamos is based on Linux however out of the box you won't be able to install both it as well as Windows for example as there's no dual booting so if you do decide to install steam OS keep in mind that it will delete everything else on your hard drive so definitely be careful once you're ready to begin you need to download steam OS installer dot zip from valve and I'll have that linked in the description you can also use the system restore option which is supposedly easier however when I tried it I ran into quite a few issues so for this tutorial we're going to stick to the standard method grab yourself a USB Drive that's at least a couple gigabytes and now we're going to freshly format it so make sure that it's been wiped clean of any data on windows just right-click the drive from my computer and select format make sure it's set to fat32 name it steam OS and then click format on Mac open up Disk Utility pick out your USB Drive and select erase again make sure it's set to fat name it steam OS and you're good here now find the steam OS installer zip we downloaded earlier and extract all the files right onto your USB Drive make sure the files aren't inside any kind of folder they should be at the root of your drive time to get this started plug the USB into your soon-to-be steam machine and enter the BIOS usually using the f10 or the delete key as it boots find the boot menu and enable legacy plus UEFI or a generic UEFI option then make sure your USB Drive is set as the first option at boot and exit the BIOS if everything worked you should see the steam OS install screen show up from here just select the automated install and give it a little while to load everything onto your hard drive it might appear to freeze a few times but just be patient and it should complete once it's done you'll see this screen that means it's safe to unplug your USB Drive and allow the PC to reboot it will then bring you to a generic looking boot menu this part is important go to the drop down menu and select gnome then type steam as the username and steam is the password both is lowercase and it should bring you to a mostly empty desktop you should see a steam icon if not log out and log back in making sure you selected the right options open up steam and now is the same installation process as on PC so just follow the prompts after it downloads log in with your account information and then it should bring you to the normal steam interface we are almost there go to the top right button and log out of the steam user account it should bring you back to the login screen flick the gnome option once again but this time login with the username and password desktop again all lowercase go up to the activities menu select applications and then pop open the terminal type this command in exactly as you see it here I also have it in the description if you can't quite read it on the video ignore the warning and type the password desktop in one more time and it will take a few minutes to create a recovery partition it will eventually bring you to this screen after a reboot just type Y hit enter and let it do its thing for a couple minutes until it boots natively into steam OS congrats you have a steam machine up and running for you guys who stuck with me this long good job now let's take a look what steam OS is all about the interface is basically the same as big picture mode as you've got support for the mouse and keyboard along with the wired xbox360 controller right out of the box you can browse through games and take a look at all the info screen shots etc and by default it shows everything however you can sort by Linux games in the store to see what actually works on steam OS as well sorting in your own library the games that you can install things are fairly basic however you do have your standard options along with information to check what version of steam OS you're running hardware info and a check for updates button there's also a basic web browser included that works decently with the controller the first game I tried was Metro last light which is one of my surprise favorite games of this year by default the screen was way too dark but after bumping up the gamma everything looked fine unlike the Windows version the quality settings boiled down to a single slider which really annoys me as it's hard to fine-tune the visuals speaking of with a GTX 650 Ti boost it's not too bad it's hard to say what the equivalent settings are normally it looked to be somewhere between low and medium by default turning things up resulted in better quality but a pretty poor framerate that ended up crashing right out to steamos left 4 dead 2 on the other hand is an almost exact port you've got full control of your quality settings and you can enable the controller and the options for the most part it runs just fine however I ran into quite a few weird hangs where the camera would just pause for a moment especially when the game was loading a new area of the map so what do you guys think of steamos are you going to give it a shot let me know in the comments below anyway if you enjoyed this video and you want to see more like this definitely be sure to subscribe to the channel so you're always kept up to date with the latest and greatest anyway guys that we'll catch you next time