Table of Contents

About

First off, I was seriously unhappy with Ubuntu 13.10. What a mess… Now that that is out of the way, it makes sense why I just reverted to a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04 x64 (LTS). I was using Valve's Steam on my 13.04 box before the 13.10 debacle just fine, but I ran into issues starting up Steam on 12.04. Turns out there were a bunch of missing libraries that it needs. The good thing is, it's an easy fix!

What to do

Install curl

Before downloading the client, it will need curl to bootstrap itself:

sudo apt-get install curl

Install the other libraries

There are going to be a bunch of libraries you need to install for Steam. Just run the following (this is on an x86_64 install, so if you are using an i386 install, you can drop the :i386 part):

sudo apt-get install fontconfig:i386 libfreetype6:i386 \
    libavahi-gobject0:i386 libgtk2.0-0:i386 libopenal1:i386 \
    libsm6:i386

It probably doesn't hurt to also install the ia32-libs meta package:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

That should suck in just about anything you could need.

Install the Steam Client

Next, just download the latest steam client and run:

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/steam_latest.deb

That will install the bare bones latest stuff, which will actually download the client. It should just work now. If not, try running it from the command-line using the steam command and check the output.

Helpful stuff

Getting the list of missing shared libraries was how I figured this out. Valve does have a helper page up here that will get you going if you know a good amount about Linux.