[Nix-dev] Deploying Steam in NixOS

Sat Sep 14 14:09:42 CEST 2013

Hi everyone,

I saw some discussions about possible other applications of getting third party binaries to run. As discussed in my blog post, I think patching/wrapping has the preference over using this chroot environment, but there are special cases in which this is not enough, such as with Steam.

There are (obviously) also some things that we can do to improve it. The best result would be that some user just clicks on the Steam icon on his desktop without noticing at all that there is a very neat trick behind it.

One of the things I read is using Linux containers. I haven't really looked at them that much, but it may definitely be worth the effort investigating.

I also have a few tricks in mind that should prevent people to turn root user to start the chroot and then turn back into himself again.

P.S. Aszlig, I just added you to the acknowledgements in my blog post, since you were also involved in the earlier package attempts ;)

________________________________
From: Aristid Breitkreuz [aristidb at gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 14, 2013 2:49 AM
To: Sander van der Burg - EWI
Cc: nix-dev at cs.uu.nl
Subject: Re: [Nix-dev] Deploying Steam in NixOS

Hi Sander,

This is really awesome. I had vague plans to eventually do the same things, but I'm glad you beat me to the punch. :) This will surely also make packaging other proprietary binary software much easier - for those cases where patchelf is not enough. One thing that seems like it would be worth adding would be with NixOS aid... a setuid wrapper that immediately after starting the chroot drops the privileges again.

By the way, Aszlig also had a packaging effort for Steam.

Cheers,

Aristid

2013/9/14 Sander van der Burg - EWI <S.vanderBurg at tudelft.nl<mailto:S.vanderBurg at tudelft.nl>>
Hello Nixers seeking some entertainment!

I also did an attempt to make Steam working in NixOS. I have used a chroot approach and for me it seems to work fine. I was capable of deploying and running Half-Life, Half Life 2, Portal and Counter Strike and they all seem to work fine on both on my desktop machine (with NVIDIA GPU) and notebook (with Intel GPU).

More details:

http://sandervanderburg.blogspot.com/2013/09/composing-fhs-compatible-chroot.html

(Just search for tl;dr if you're too impatient :P)

We may need to tweak the environment a bit to get other Steam games working that I don't know of, but the ones that I bought all seem to work.

Best,

Sander

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