Valve starts publishing packages for its Linux distribution.

Steam Box, Valve's gaming console, is likely to be sold with a pre-installed customized version of Linux. The first sketches of a future operating system have already begun to appear on the Valve repository web server.

As Michael Larabel says , the so-called “Steam Box” is likely to come with a customized version of Debian or Ubuntu. Most logical to expect the release of the operating system on Ubuntu Core. Of course, the LTS version will be taken as a basis, with a long period of support.

The owners of the site Phoronix hinted that there is a hometest repository, the access rights to which were changed to public a few days ago. Unlike the regular Valve repository, which contains only the Steam and Steam Launcher packages, there are updates for Steam on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, experimental nVidia drivers for Linux, the boot screen for the Plymouth bootloader, and new non-boring wallpapers.

Earlier this year, it became known that the planned console will most likely use the X.Org Server. This is facilitated by a number of reasons: the desire to Valve not to delay and release its console later this year, Mir’s unwillingness and the lack of Mir and Wayland support in the proprietary nVidia and AMD drivers.
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At the moment, this is all that is known about Gabe Newell’s intentions. This is not enough, but the distribution plans for the future console from Valve are obvious. The development of events will be judged in the coming months.

Michael Larabel, who has a certain kind of contact in Valve, claims that additional features and console interfaces will be included in the Big Screen full screen mode in the Steam client. As in the usual Big Picture, the “Steam Box” will have a full-fledged web browser.

Such a construction of the operating system of the console will not interfere with its use for third-party purposes or reconfiguration under itself. It is expected that the distinction between the “Steam Linux” distribution and the Steam client installed on Ubuntu is not expected.

Valve, which owns the Steam video game distribution system, has been trying to create its own game console for a long time, hires famous people of the free software world, and takes certain steps towards promoting Linux-based operating systems as a free platform for games. One of the reasons for this is the presence of a pre-installed app store in the latest Microsoft operating system.