Preface

Sometime after my first install of LFS, I had an question that others had: how do I install Steam on this system? I kept that thought in the back of my head as I went for Beyond LFS, a book that covered a good number of packages I needed. However, the issue of Steam was not cleared up yet. So I just tried to install the Steam tarball. Because I did not have 32-bit libraries, this ended in failure.

Beyond LFS doesn't cover the installation of Steam, so I had to look elsewhere. I learned shortly after my attempt that I needed a multilib toolchain. I sent an email to the blfs-support mailing list in search of potential multilib support. Douglas Reno saw my email and suggested to give Thomas' Multilib branch a read. I rebuilt my LFS system with multilib support in mind.

Rahul Chandra in the same thread mentioned his scripts for his distro, Tucana. These scripts gave me a basic idea of how to do lib32 installations for BLFS packages which were necessary for Steam.. While this wasn't exactly difficult, it was a big timesink as I had to manually type in all the lib32 compilation options to successfully build 32-bit libraries. Even after having built all the 32-bit libraries required, a few more fixes and files were necessary. After about a week, I managed to get Steam working. I realized that this was a lot of work, and many users who'd want to do the same thing would get stuck and not know what to do. In the worst case, they'd give up before even reaching their goal. I had made a pretty lackluster YouTube video explaining some troubleshooting information in an attempt to make things a bit easier. Shortly after the video, I realized it wasn't really good enough. Knowledge and methods are one thing, but hours spent is another. I put my ambitions for an easier guide on my backlog and did other things.

Sometime afterwards, I decided to do a stream series that included that installation of Wine, not just Steam. My general idea was to compile all the stream footage (roughly 40 GB worth) into a single video master guide. When some time passed, I came to the conclusion that for a installation guide for two complex packages on an LFS system, a video is not a great format. I decided to then write up some basic HTML. Rahul Chandra came across my YouTube post and reached out to me. He suggested that I should reuse the LFS/BLFS codebase to make my own book. That led to this book's creation and editing.

Hopefully this book does its job. Have fun, and good luck!