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Showing posts from 2015

Arch Linux Chroot on Steam Link (Easy Setup)

Alright, this should be a much more user-friendly method of getting an Arch Linux chroot going on your steam link. But by doing it this way you're going to have to have some trust in me as we're going to be downloading and running a shell script that could potentially screw up your Steam Link. Its very un-likely though, more likely is losing important data on any storage devices you may have plugged into the Link. So first things first you're going to need a USB HDD or pendrive that you don't care about as all of the data on it needs to be wiped. After you're certain that this storage device has nothing important on it plug it into the steam link. Then you're going to need SSH access to your steam link, after you've SSH'd into your steam link do `busybox sh` to switch to a better shell with tab auto-completion. Now do `cd` to enter /home/steam/ then do `wget http://fgthou.se/steamlink/create-chroot-device.sh` to download my script that will automate t...

Arch Linux Chroot on Steam Link (Manual Setup)

Note: If you don't have access to a Linux desktop you can use this method instead. I'm going to try and help you guys setup an Arch Linux chroot environment on your steam link. If you don't know what SSH or Linux is then this post isn't for you. First things first you'll need to have ssh access to your steam link. Below I'm going to detail setting this up with my pre-created tar file on a Linux desktop, if you don't want to use my premade one I'll detail how I made it at the end. If you're on Windows just wait it out, I'll do a post for it later. Download steamlink-chroot.tar.gz First you'll need a separate pendrive or usb hdd to run the chroot environment on. You need to format this harddrive/pendrive to have an ext4 partition on it that the chroot will be on. You'll need to make this partition at least 1GB, the extracted tar file is roughly 700Mb but you'll want some spare room for pacman updates ect. After you've cr...

Disabling Steam Link Auto-Standby

There was a reddit post a week or two ago that was having trouble keeping their Link on while watching youtube. I posted a fix in there but forgot to make it more public for others with the same issue to find. So if your Steam Link is automatically turning off / hibernating / standby / shutdown / suspending whatever you want to call it there is a temporary fix until Valve adds a setting for it. The steam link is set to enter a suspended state after 15 minutes of inactivity by default, the defaults can be changed with two files though. Create two files, name one `suspend_timeout_idle.txt` and the other `suspend_timeout_interactive.txt`. These two files will contain the number of seconds before the Link will ask if you're still using the device, and the other file is the time before the Link will auto-standby without asking. I still haven't entirely figured out why there's two files yet but by default both of them are set to 900 seconds so I just keep them the same value w...

Removing Steam Link Bandwidth Limit

A reddit thread brought to my attention that there is a bandwidth limit on the steam link. I've finally figured out where the stream settings are saved and how to read / write them.You will also have to make one file called streaming_args.txt, I'll explain below. streaming_settings.bin  This config file has its maximum_bitrate_kbps set to 0. Which signifies no limit. streaming_settings_100000.bin  This config file has its maximum_bitrate_kbps set to 100,000 for 100mbps. To use these you can either scp them into your /mnt/config/system/ folder as streaming_settings.bin or you can put the file on a USB pendrive as /steamlink/config/system/streaming_settings.bin and reboot with the pendrive inserted. (Note: You need to hard 'reboot' un-plug and re-plug the power, you should see the steamlink on a blue background icon thing.) To see if it worked goto your Streaming settings and press Y to go into Advanced Settings. If it worked your Bandwidth Limit row wil...

Steam Link Developer Builds

Notice for anyone that hasn't found the dev_build.txt and the two indev builds 'available' to the public right now. I've been neglecting to post the dev_builds.txt just to avoid anyone from grabbing the 337 and 341 and flashing them to their links. The 337 build works fine but I see no notable changes, the 341 build actually fails to run on the steam link. On startup the 341 build gives you an error telling you to contact a internal valve employee. The message is a little more specific but I'm trying to avoid names.  But if you're feeling technical and comfortable in your ability to fix your steam link should something mess up then you can flash the 337 and 341 builds manually with a USB drive, see the S01config script in /etc/init.d/startup in there you can see how to change your update branch to dev and flash the dev images. Once again I'm being ambiguous just to avoid hand-holding anyone into messing something up. All in all though the two dev builds d...

Root and SSH Access on the Steam Link

Alright this was a lot easier than I expected. Thanks Valve! After digging through the full 332 update zip I found that Valve left their developer init scripts in /etc/init.d/startup. Not sure if they did this intentionally or not but I like it. So first and foremost I was wrong about the Android AOSP thing, it looks like its just a custom linux and the android stuff I was seeing earlier was just from them using the android signing utility for their updates. Basically they use signapk on their zip files which leaves some android stuff in META-INF. So sorry about the false alarm there. As for enabling ssh on your Steam Link its very easy. All you need to do is get a pendrive and make this file in these folders: /steamlink/config/system/enable_ssh.txt (Note: the file must have some data in it, if enable_ssh.txt is empty it will not work) Then reboot the Steam Link with the pendrive inserted, after its done connecting to the network you can ssh into the Steam Link as root with the p...

Steam Link Software Update System

Currently looking into the updater system for the Steam Link. As for the update system its fairly simple, the first thing the Link does is send a request to. http://media.steampowered.com/steamlink/06_2015/public_builds.txt That returns a newline delimited list of the 'public' Steam Link builds. If there is a higher version in that list somewhere then it will send a request to http://media.steampowered.com/steamlink/06_2015/SystemUpdate_delta_[current_version]_[latest_version].zip That will download the delta update and the system will reboot. Its actually pretty well thought out how they designed the update system, it uses bsdiff to keep the updates small.  Also after some trial and error I found that http://media.steampowered.com/steamlink/06_2015/SystemUpdate_full_[version].zip is also available for full updates, these zips even contain the recovery/bootloader files.
Wow I haven't used this site in forever. Might have some updates about the Steam Link here soon.