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Installing Steam on 64-bit Linux Mint Debian Edition

One of my motivations for installing Linux Mint Debian Edition was to see for myself the efforts Valve have been making over the last few months, porting most of their games and their Steam platform to Linux.

It turns out that LMDE was not the best choice for this as the version of Linux that Valve primarily supports is Ubuntu, and there are a few differences between Debian and Ubuntu distributions - even though Ubuntu is more or less based on Debian.

One of the consequences is that the version of Steam distributed by Valve doesn't actually install on LMDE. Fortunately nearly all of the work to resolve this has been done already over hereย http://www.sarplot.org/howto/45/Steam_on_64bit_Debian_Wheezy_70.ย If you don't have an ATI graphics card those instructions might be all you need. If you do have an ATI card (like me) then when you try to launch steam, you may see the following error:

Error: You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run:
libGL.so.1

One final step is needed, to have steam launching correctly:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-fglrx-glx:i386

By ff

Systems software engineer with interests in C/C++/Rust on Linux, electronic music and games.

8 replies on “Installing Steam on 64-bit Linux Mint Debian Edition”

Same, I greatly appreciate you documenting your solution. I didn't want to install steam, but instead wanted to check something on my account. Steam requires I use the client to do that nowadays. GRRRR

Ati Radeon HD5800, Crunchbang Linux 64, Steam + Skyrim.
Your method has corrected this error wen launching Skyrim:
err:wgl:has_opengl Failed to load libGL: libGL.so.1

Hope your post will stay here for long time ๐Ÿ™‚
Thank you so much from France.

The problem with that method is that, at least when I tried, it replaces the 64 bit libraries with 32 bit ones; which would mean running 32 bit version of catalyst on a 64 bit system. Is there a way to add the 32 bit libs and keep fglrx 64 bit? I do have multi-arch enabled, but it does not seem to make a difference. I'm open to any suggestions?

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