Installing Applications From The Wheezy Repo In SteamOS

This is a tutorial in how to add the Debian repos to SteamOS and install applications from them. It will involve using the desktop mode and the Linux command-line, I will show how to enable the desktop and what commands to run. Make sure you have your keyboard handy because you will need it. I always recommend before you run any command you make sure you have some idea what it will do, you can do this with man (command) in the terminal or with Google. Now to get started, we need to enable the desktop:

1. Start your SteamBox, login and get the to main screen if you haven't already.

2. Go to Settings -> Interface and select Enable the Desktop

   Now to switch to the desktop

3. Get back to the main screen by hitting Esc. Then navigate to Exit and select Switch to Desktop

   After a moment you should be staring at your desktop. Make sure your keyboard is plugged in.

4. Drag your mouse to the top-left corner of the screen, type terminal and hit enter to open a terminal window.

5. Now that we have the terminal open, the first thing we need to do is give the desktop user a password. So enter this command and then enter a password when prompted.

   passwd

6. Open the file sources.list (the file that stores what repos to use) using this command

   sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

7. Go to the bottom of the file and add these lines. ( you can paste with right-click or ctrl+shift+v )

    deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
    deb-src ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
   

   ######Note: These are these are the urls for the US servers. You can pick another one from the list found here.

8. Close Nano with ctrl+x and hit y to save the file.

   The Debian repositories are now added. However, before we can let them be we have to do something called apt-pinning. This helps us make sure that when SteamOS updates it doesn't replace a crucial package with a Debian version and crash.

9. Create a preferences file to pin our repositories (and prevent our system from starting on fire) with this command:

   sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences

10. Type (or copy) the following into the file and then save with ctrl+x and then y.

    Package: *
    Pin: release l=SteamOS
    Pin-Priority: 900
    
    Package: *
    Pin: release l=Debian
    Pin-Priority:-10
    

11. Now run the following command to refresh our repositories:

    sudo apt-get update

12. You can now install applications from the debian repo with the following command

    sudo apt-get install -t wheezy (package-name)

You can find applications using the website here or by running this command:

apt-cache search -t wheezy (application) | more

Unfortunately the add/remove packages GUI pre-installed won't let you see any of the packages from the Debian repo. It would work if we set the pin priority to 110, but -10 safer.

N.B. Valve issued updates in January 2014 which means there is no need to use apt-pinning for wheezy repo.

Credit to Shark http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse/discussions/1/648814396114274132/