Running Steam on openSUSE 12.3

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Steam offers a catalog of Linux games, many of which support Steam Play so you can buy once and play anywhere, and Cross-Platform Multiplayer so you can play with all your friends, no matter where they log in. Sweet!

So now that Steam is available for Linux it does not always work for your favorite distribution because it seems they are catering mostly to Ubuntu right now. Thats not to say openSUSE hasn't done any work here. Our community has built a package which will work quite fine. Here are the instructions to help you get started.

1. We need to subscribe to the repository for Steam. (we do have repositories for other distributions as well take a look at hose here http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/ )

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_12.3/ openSUSE_12.3_Games

2. Lets install Steam

# zypper in steam 

3.  Now its time to execute it. From konsole (or shell of your choice) we can now execute the following:

# steam

It will now start downloading some bundles and install them. Once finished it will start steam.

4. Your probably wondering at this point how you get your sound to work in the games. In order to do that you will need to start steam with the following variable.

# SDL_AUDIODRIVER=alsa steam

setting it to alsa will do the trick. Hope this helps.

Enjoy!

Box.com with Linux and no client using davfs2

Box.com lets you store all of your content online, so you can access, manage and share it from anywhere. Integrate Box with Google Apps and Salesforce and access Box on mobile devices. Some people use it to back up their workstations. Something that is very intriguing for Linux users is the fact that you can directly mount your box.com to a folder on Linux with davfs2. Neat!





1. First thing we need to do is to install davfs2.
For openSUSE 12.3 we will need to add the following repository in order to get it.

# zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/filesystems/openSUSE_Factory/ openSUSE_Factory-filesystems

2. Once you have added the repository we are now ready to install it.

# zypper in davfs2

3. Now we will need a place to mount our box.com. I like to put it under my home directory. (md is an alias in SUSE)
Note: change some_user to the user id your using.

# md /home/some_user/box

4. Now we will add a line to our /etc/fstab so that it will mount each time we boot our system up. So open your /etc/fstab for editing with your choice of editor and put the following at the bottom.
Note: change some_user to the user id your using.

https://www.box.com/dav /home/some_user/box davfs rw,user,noauto 0 0

5. Now lets add a line to the bottom of our /etc/davfs2/secrets file. Open your /etc/davfs2/secrets file for editing with your choice of editor and put the following at the bottom.
Note: Make sure to use your email address and password.

https://www.box.com/dav user@email.com password

6. Edit the /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf file and change the following line

# use_locks 1

Changed it to this

 use_locks 0

 7. Now it is time to mount our box.com to /home/some_user/box . To mount id we will use the following command.

# mount /home/some_user/box

To show that it is there run these commands:

# mount | grep box 

# df  | grep box

8. Now start using it. rsync something to it or copy something in to it using your favorite desktop environment.

# rsync -avzP  somefile.tar.gz /home/some_user/box/ 

Thats all there is to it. Now you can enjoy a client free cloud storage using davfs2 and box.com .
Enjoy!