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Installing AntiMicro on SteamOS

Jeff Backus edited this page Jun 4, 2016 · 4 revisions

Preface

Most of this page is based around getting antimicro to work on SteamOS Alchemist. Getting antimicro installed on SteamOS Brewmaster is a bit easier. One big difference is that the problem with Qt packages has been resolved in the Brewmaster repository. The only package that is required to be pulled from the Debian Jessie repository is libsdl2-2.0-0.

SteamOS Modifications

The first major piece of documentation that you will want to read, if you haven't done so for your SteamOS installation, is the post Installing applications from the Debian repo in SteamOS. It details some essential, although unsupported, post-install steps that most technical-minded SteamOS users will want to perform in order to get a greater amount of control over the SteamOS environment, particularly for the purpose of installing software not provided by the Steam client or in the SteamOS repositories. In summation, the post will tell you how to enable Debian Wheezy repositories in order to have access to more software, pinning the Debian Wheezy repositories so that there will be the least amount of chance of Debian packages overridding SteamOS packages, and telling you how to specify that you want to install software from Debian repositories as opposed to software from the SteamOS repository.

The post does omit one essential tip that is mentioned in a later post. You will want to install aptitude and rely upon it almost exclusively for installing packages as opposed to using apt-get. The main reason is because it is a lot better about finding ways around dependency issues when using multiple repositories and allowing minimal damage when mixing software from multiple sources. This will really help regarding backports. Once you have done all that, you can now start to focus on the specific steps to install AntiMicro on SteamOS. The first thing that you will want to do is to install the Wheezy backports repositories. In this case, it is only needed for the libsdl2-2.0-0 Debian Wheezy backports package. Although, you will likely want those repositories enabled if you want to install other software as well. In order to enable the Debian Wheezy backports repositories, you will have to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and include two lines specifying the backports repository mirror of your choice. A list of the available mirrors is provided at the following link.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://debian.uchicago.edu/debian wheezy-backports main contrib non-free
deb-src ftp://debian.uchicago.edu/debian wheezy-backports main contrib non-free

After that, run aptitude update on your system to update the package list.

sudo aptitude update

Working Around Package Issue

The next step is to take care of initial dependency problems since dpkg does not install missing dependencies. This will likely be the section that will require this post to be updated so there might be some omissions. The easiest dependency to take care of is libsdl2-2.0-0. You will have to install the package from wheezy-backports. Lately, I have been using the ncurses GUI that aptitude provides but I will show how to do the tasks using the aptitude command line arguments.

sudo aptitude install -t wheezy-backports libsdl2-2.0-0

After that, you will have to work around getting Qt4 installed on SteamOS. Valve does provide some deb files for various portions of Qt in the SteamOS repositories. However, the libqtgui4 package has two dependencies, libmng1 and libaudio2, which are not included in the SteamOS repositories so libqtgui4 cannot be installed using the SteamOS repositories; hopefully, Valve resolves that issue at some point. Install libmng1 and libaudio2 from the Wheezy repository.

sudo aptitude install -t wheezy libmng1 libaudio2

Now, you should be able to install Qt properly.

sudo aptitude install libqt4-network libqtcore4 libqtgui4

The Actual Installation

At this point, all the necessary dependencies should be installed on your system in order to be able to run AntiMicro. The next step is to open a web browser (Iceweasel being the default browser in desktop mode) and download the AntiMicro Jessie deb file; the latest Debian deb file will be listed at http://ryochan7.com/projects/antimicro/. Now, you will want to open a terminal and cd into the directory where you downloaded the file. In all likelyhood, it will be downloaded to the /home/desktop/Downloads directory.

cd /home/desktop/Downloads

Now, you will actually install AntiMicro. You will have to run dpkg in order to install the program. Please replace antimicro_2.1-2_amd64.deb with the actual filename of the deb package that you downloaded.

sudo dpkg -i antimicro_2.1-2_amd64.deb

If all goes well, dpkg should not throw any errors during the installation and you will be able to run AntiMicro. With AntiMicro installed on your system, you will be able to download or create profiles that will give you reasonable gamepad support for an application. You can then make a custom bash script to load AntiMicro with the appropriate profile and then your desired game.

Running The Program

Running antimicro on SteamOS is a bit different than with other Linux distributions due to the way that the sessions are set up. For some tips on getting antimicro running on SteamOS, you can check out the following page.

https://github.com/AntiMicro/antimicro/wiki/Using-antimicro-on-SteamOS