Valve' SteamOS is now released for public and can be downloaded now. As announced by Valve, along with the release of SteamOS, they are now shipping the prototype units to the 300 beta testers.
SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system was announced back in September. Also, Steam Machines are expected to launch in 2014 and will be revealed at CES on 6th of January. This open source OS is based on Debian, specifically Wheezy 7.1 distribution.
Here are the system requirements for running SteamOS.
- Intel or AMD 64 bit processor
- NVIDIA Graphics Card, support for AMD and Intel will be coming soon
- 4GB or more memory
- 500GB or larger disk space
- UEFI boot support
- USB port for installation
All SteamOS machines are set to auto-update the OS from Valve's public repo. It also comes with a Desktop mode which allows user to run regular Linux applications on their systems. You just have to add third-party sources to the list of your subscriber repo to get more apps. But this isn't a OS for running apps, and Valve recommends to use Ubuntu for running Linux apps.
You can download SteamOS from here.
Installing SteamOS
Installing SteamOS is a bit easy if you have installed Linux distributions previously. The installer will erase everything on your machine. The easiest method is to restore the files on the USB stick. It requires at least 1TB of disk.
What you have to do is download SYSRESTORE.ZIP from the download link. Now, format a 4GB or larger USB with FAT32 filesystem and disk name as "SYSRESTORE". Now unzip the contents of the file SYSRESTORE.ZIP in the USB stick.
Once you're done restoring, you just need to boot with the USB stick and if everything goes fine, it will load the GRUB menu. You then need to select "Restore Entire Disk" from the GRUB menu and it will automatically proceed with the installation.
Once it completes, your machine will reboot to SteamOS.
You can read more about SteamOS here.