Steam on Gentoo

Following my last post where I set up the Gentoo kernel on my laptop, one of the next things to do was get the Steam client running on the system. I used this wiki page for the base setup and followed the manual approach after failing an attempt to use overlays (USE flag chaos ensued and I just restarted). Honestly, I thought the overlay was going to save me from having to copy over the dependency lists and it did not.

To save you, my fellow reader, from having to deal with that nonsense, I have added both updated files to my website. If you cd to each of the desired locations then call wget, you will scoop those files for free. The full code is:

mkdir /etc/portage/sets/
cd /etc/portage/sets/
wget http://www.theworldmatrix.ca/steam_set -O steam

cd /etc/portage/package.use/
wget http://www.theworldmatrix.ca/steam

I did both of these before emerge'ing using this call:

emerge -a @steam

Then update check:

emerge -a --changed-use --deep @world

Fetch the steam installer while logged into a user rather than root and then open it (this way it goes into /home I believe; keep in mind that the \ is a line continuation mark):

wget http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ \
archive/precise/steam_latest.tar.gz
tar -xvzpf steam_latest.tar.gz

Now, when I followed the instructions from here I got all kinds of weird errors that varied depending on whether I was in root or in a user account. The first one had to do with the other tar file that was downloaded (bootstraplinux_ubuntu12_32.tar.xz). I fixed this by running make install from root in the steam directory. The user account then started to get errors stemming from /share/Steam/steam.sh (e.g., VERSION_ID: unbound variable) while the root account first complained about xterm (I updated the portage files that you downloaded to accommodate this change), then complained about a missing $DISPLAY variable. After scouring the docs, I realized that there seemed to be a conflict when xterm tried to boot the Xorg display server. So, knowing that Gnome booted the display server, I booted up Gnome and tried to run the steam code in an xterm window. It worked! The final command from within the steam folder in your home directory is:

./steam

And that is it. Enjoy!