Sources say that Valves Steam is bringing its gaming service to Apple’s Macs and there may also be a treat for Linux users. Mac has been in the back ground dying for the last decade with out game support. In the past Linux users would only be able to play games that would work in Wine (Wine is an implementation of the Windows Application Programing Interface (API) library, acting as a bridge between the Windows program and Linux). Not any more!!
At the end of April to the First of May Valve will open the door for gaming ALL around. The Proof is in Steam’s Mac Client showing support of Linux. Valve hopes to woo Mac owners to Steam’s services by using a UI that closely mimics the regular Windows edition. Reports confirm previous claims that Steam and the Source gaming engine will run naively on Mac OS X using OpenGL instead of relying on a wrapper such as Cider to translate the Windows versions to Mac. That commitment and designation of Mac OS X as a “Tier-1 Platform” offer evidence that Valve is seeking to make the Mac gaming experience as equal to the Windows experience as possible. Which means that Linux users stand a chance to gain from this as well.
The proof is in the pudding as they say
#!/bin/bash
# figure out the absolute path to the script being run a bit
# non-obvious, the ${0%/*} pulls the path out of $0, cd’s into the
# specified directory, then uses $PWD to figure out where that
# directory lives – and all this in a subshell, so we don’t affect
# $PWDSTEAMROOT=$(cd “${0%/*}” && echo $PWD)
#determine platform
UNAME=`uname`
if [ "$UNAME" == "Darwin" ]; then
PLATFORM=osx32
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=”${STEAMROOT}”/${PLATFORM}:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
elif [ "$UNAME" == "Linux" ]; then
PLATFORM=linux32
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=”${STEAMROOT}”/${PLATFORM}:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
fi
For the non code readers here, the Steam launcher checks the platform so that it loads the right library path. But as you can clearly see Linux is supported in there. Why would Steam put that script in the code unless making way for Linux! It has been many long years of waiting for Games to finely come to the TUX systems and it looks like Valve may change that.
