SteamOS Fun

For a while I've been meaning to build a SteamOS box and I finally got round to getting a spare machine with a reasonably recent video card to try it out on.

Having read that SteamOS only install on UEFI systems and noting that my motherboard has a good old BIOS, I elected to download a VaporOS image onto my ZM-VE200, plugged it into a USB slot and fired up the PC. The machine booted from the ZM just fine and the VaporOS install proceeded just fine until it expired almost at completion with a GRUB installation error. I tried playing around with the HDD configuration a bit without any progress.

OK, maybe the VaporOS was borked somehow - let's try downloading a vanilla SteamOS iso and see how we go. Surprisingly, the SteamOS installer fires up just fine and works OK - they've added support for regular BIOS machines while I wasn't looking - that's nice. However, GRUB installation still fails.

After considerable head-scratching, I eventually burn a SteamOS installation CDROM and load it into the machine's internal drive rather than using the Zalman. Lo and behold the installation works just fine. That's good but I am still intrigued about why the Zalman route failed since it emulates an CDROM drive perfectly in my experience.

Some more investigation reveals that the GRUB install fails because it references /dev/cdrom0 so you can only install from the first CDROM drive on a machine. As my box already had a drive, the Zalman became /dev/cdrom1 and although the rest of the installation was fine, the GRUB installation scripts failed. Subsequently, unplugging the internal drive proved that an install from the Zalman would work fine provided it was the first drive.