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How I setup gaming on Void

Initial setup#

So I have an NVIDIA optimus laptop, which has both an intel gpu and a nvidia gpu

First I installed the drivers for nvidia, by installing the nvidia package from non free repo.

I was able to find it by installing the package for non free repo void-repo-nonfree.

I also installed void-repo-multilib and void-repo-multilib-nonfree because why not?

Then while the nvidia package was installing, I noticed that linux-headers for kernel 5.12 was being installed, while my kernel was 5.10, even though I had updated, so I stopped installing and rebooted to get the current kernel, and then installed nvidia

Then I checked if nvidia is running by doing

nvidia-smi
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 460.84 Driver Version: 460.84 CUDA Version: 11.2 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 GeForce GTX 1650 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 Off | N/A |
| N/A 49C P8 2W / N/A | 6MiB / 3911MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 871 G /usr/libexec/Xorg 4MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Perfect! Now comes the hard part.

Installing Steam and its dependencies#

Well I first installed the steam package, and when I tried running it, it would say that some 32 bit libraries are fucking missing. I looked it up on youtube and found a guy who had installed steam, and just followed what he did. Installed these packages!

  1. glibc-32bit (Steam mentioned it as libc though both are the same thing, a quick google search could tell you that)
  2. libdrm-32bit
  3. libglapi-32bit
  4. libva-glx-32bit
  5. nvidia-gtklibs-32bit
  6. nvidia-libs-32bit

The last 2 are downloaded because nvidia contains 64 bit versions of them, and steam requires 32 bit versions

Steam had finally installed, but it wouldnt launch properly, and I'd still get the Badlength X error sometimes, I then googled a bit and found that someone solved it by running steam through prime-run, thats when it clicked for me.

Nvidia was running but it wasn't being used for launching the applications, intel had first priority. But I hadn't installed Intel drivers yet! It made sense why Steam wouldnt launch then.

Installing Intel graphics drivers#

I went to the directory /usr/share/doc/steam and opened the file README.voidlinux which contained some information. From there I realized that I had to install mesa-dri-32bit to run steam, and thats what I did!! After that steam would run without prime-run !! Fucking wow

Result#

Fucking WOW!

My Steam Library

References#

  1. Nvidia
  2. Repositories
  3. Installing Steam on Void Linux
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