Stephenson's Rocket - a modified SteamOS installer, with wider support for more complex computers
SteamOS is now shipping, in beta form at least, and it's all cool and stuff.
Valve have now integrated most of the improvements from Ye Olde SteamOSe, such as BIOS and DVD support, into their installer. You can download it from here.
Stephenson's Rocket replaces the Ye Olde SteamOSe project by building back on Valve's installer with bug fixes and improvements - especially hardware support.
This kind of collaborative development demonstrates the power of Open Source - and remember, you can contribute to Stephenson's Rocket too! Click "View on GitHub" at the top of the screen to get started, and watch the development tutorial video linked below!
A DVD image is always available at http://stephensonsrocket.horse/
To get started, download the torrent.
Otherwise, clone this repo, and run ./gen.sh
.
Just burn the ISO to a blank DVD from your favourite tool, and boot it.
Open a Terminal window from the Utilities section of Applications.
Type diskutil list
to get a list of devices - one of them will be your USB stick (e.g. /dev/disk2
). Follow the Linux instructions below but change:
/dev/sdX
to /dev/rdiskX
bs=1M
to bs=1m
Plug in the USB stick and run dmesg
; look for a line similar to this:
[377039.485179] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk
In this case, sdc
is the device name for the USB stick you just inserted. Now we put the installer on the stick, as root (e.g. use sudo
) run
dd bs=1M if=/path/to/rocket.iso of=/dev/sdX
sdX should be the USB stick device from the information you received from dmesg
. Be sure to use sdX, not sdX1 or sdX2. Then boot into the stick.
Download Win32 Disk Imager and use it to copy the .iso to your USB stick (1GB minimum size).
Pick the "Automatic Install" option to wipe the first hard disk in your system and install SteamOS to it.
For more sophisticated booting - e.g. dual-boot or custom partition sizes - select the "Expert" option. Use of this mode is documented in the support video here.
Beyond that, just follow Valve's instructions from their site - Stephenson's Rocket should behave exactly like the real SteamOS, except it works on more systems
Before you generate a new image you need to ensure that your pull is up to date as things change quickly:
git pull
in the steamos-installer directory will ensure you have the latest code../gen.sh -d
will ensure that you download the latest SteamOSDVD.isoTest it and report back to #steamos on Freenode
Or support me by donating - Donate via PayPal, Steam, or Amazon. Donations will be used to help with testing - wifi adapters, hard disks, graphics cards, etc.