How to install SteamOS in VirtualBox

Late on Friday, December 13, Valve released the first public version of SteamOS. It is essentially just a version of Debian 7.1 (Wheezy) that has Steam pre-installed.
It’s well worth installing SteamOS in VirtualBox. That’s what I did — and I’ve written a guide on how to install SteamOS in VirtualBox, if you feel like doing the same.

Grab the latest version of VirtualBox and install it (it may take some time.) Get SteamOSInstaller.zip from Valve. Download ISO Creator and install it. 

Extract SteamOSInstaller.zip into its own folder. Open ISO Creator. You can name the ISO whatever you like, just make sure you save the ISO in a sensible location. Select the folder that you extracted the zip file to. Hit Start and wait a minute or two while the ISO is created.

Now open VirtualBox. This bit is somewhat complex with lots of little steps and gotchas, so be careful. Create a New virtual machine. Give it any name. Type = Linux. Version = Debian (64 bit). Click Next. Pick any amount of memory (1GB is sensible if you’re just going to fool around; 4GB if you want to try out DOTA 2 or something). Accept the default options on the next few pages of the wizard, and choose “Dynamically allocated” when prompted. Pick a hard drive size of around 50GB.

Once you’ve created the virtual machine, select it on the right hand side and enter Settings. Click System and select Enable EFI. Click Display and select Enable 3D Acceleration. Slide the Video Memory slider up to 128MB. Click Network and select Bridged Adapter from the Attached to drop-down. Click USB and use the + icon on the right to add your USB keyboard and mouse (if applicable).

Finally, head to Storage, click the optical disc icon under Controller: IDE, then hit the optical disc icon on the right hand side (see image). Click Choose A Virtual CD/DVD Disk File, then find the ISO file that you made earlier. Click OK to return to the main VirtualBox interface.

If you receive an error at this point, it’s probably because you haven’t enabled virtualization in BIOS. Enabling virtualization is beyond the scope of this how-to, but if you Google the name of your motherboard and “how to enable virtualization” it’s pretty easy.

Start the SteamOS machine!

Now, click Start and pray. If all goes to plan, you’ll be greeted with a prompt that looks like the image above. After 2.0 Shell> type the following: FS0:\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX640. If you can’t type the backslash (\) for some reason (I couldn’t), change your system’s keyboard to US layout, then use the On-Screen Keyboard app to type the \. Press Enter, and you should be greeted with the first sign that you’re installing SteamOS.

From this screen, press Enter to begin the automated install. Don’t worry about the WILL ERASE DISK! warning — VirtualBox prevents SteamOS from changing anything on your local filesystem.

The installation process is automatic and takes a few minutes.

Once the automated install is complete the system will reboot and you’ll be greeted with the above screen. Select the second option, recovery mode. The system will boot up and you’ll end up at a Linux command prompt.

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions

So that SteamOS is actually usable as a virtualized OS (clipboard sharing, shared folders, better mouse pointer integration), you must now install VirtualBox’s Guest Additions. From the command prompt type the following commands, pressing Enter after each one.

• mount /media/cdrom
• sh /media/cdrom/VboxLinuxAdditions.run

This will take a few moments to install, then type reboot and press Enter.

Almost there…

This time around, don’t touch the GRUB bootloader and your system will automatically boot into a graphical interface — SteamOS! Well, almost. You’ll be greeted with a login prompt. Keep Default Xsession selected. The username and password are both steam.

For some reason, the Return To Steam icon on the desktop doesn’t work; you need to click Activities in the top left, then Applications, and scroll down to Steam. The Steam app will update, and then you’ll be greeted with the usual login prompt. Log in, hit Big Picture in the top right corner… and voila! You now have a (virtualized) Steam Machine!

From this point on, you’re pretty much on your own. I haven’t explored SteamOS much yet, but to be honest it doesn’t look like there’s much to discover: Right now, I think it’s just Debian with Steam pre-installed. It’s probably a good idea to have SteamOS installed now, though, so that you can take a look at exciting features — such as local game streaming — when they’re rolled out in 2014.

Laptops for engineers

Along with gamers, engineers pose one of the toughest design challenges for laptop makers. Engineering applications crave memory, graphics horsepower, and large screens — all hurdles in designing stylish, lightweight laptops. The result is a necessary tradeoff between performance and convenience. While not every engineer will make the same compromises, there are a few laptops that stand out for use by engineers, depending on their specific needs.

So what is the best laptop for an engineer? Here are a two great options, one of which will get the job done for you.

Lenovo ThinkPad W540

For those used to lugging a typical portable workstation “brick” the new Lenovo ThinkPad W540 may be a breath of fresh air. While not lightweight compared to a business laptop, at just under 5.5 pounds and just over an inch thick, it is not much larger than a MacBook Pro. Under the hood it can be configured with a variety of 4th generation (Haswell) Core i7 processors — ranging up to the 4930MX capable of 3GHz (3.9GHz  Turbo). It can also be stuffed full with up to 32GB of RAM and a 2880×1620 high resolution display. As befits a laptop designed for heavy-duty graphics, it features an Nvidia Quadro K1100 or K2100 discrete GPU.

Sager NP9570

Often the words “portable” and “mobile” are used interchangeably. Not with the Sager NP9560. This beast of a machine is essentially a portable desktop, but not what you’d call a mobile computing device. Not as well-known as the big brand names, Sager has a reputation for  creating machines with amazing performance. For those who want maximum power, the Sager NP9570 is an amazing laptop. Available with CPUs up to an Intel Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition CPU (typically a desktop processor), running at 3.60GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) this laptop’s raw performance is its defining characteristic.

The 1080p display isn’t as sexy as the ultra-high-resolution versions available on other machines, but it has an unmatched three hard drive bays, a tons of ports, 7.1 channel sound, and the choice of two powerhouse 4GB or 5GB Nvidia GeForce 770M or 680M video cards with SLI. This selections makes it the top graphics performer in anything short of a full-on desktop.

The downside of this machine, not surprisingly, is the size and weight. At 12 pounds, it is a beast in more ways than one. Part of the weight is the 17-inch display that covers 90% of the NTSC color gamut, but the high-powered, near-desktop components drive most of the rest.

The very first transistor

The operation of a transistor is entirely based on a class of materials known as semiconductors, which chemists and engineers have known about since the mid-1800s. In 1833, Michael Faraday noted that silver sulfide decreased in electrical resistance when heated (metals usually increase in resistance when heated). In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell used selenium — a semiconductor that produces electricity when it’s struck by light — to transmit sound over a distance with his Photophone device.

Real analysis of semiconductors didn’t really begin until the 1920s, though, when scientists tried to work out why and how there was a class of materials that appeared to be metals, but behaved very differently than normal metals. With World War II, and the advent of radar and other radio technologies, semiconductors started to become very serious business. It wasn’t really until Bell Labs started researching semiconductors after WW2, though, that we finally started to learn about and control the properties of semiconductors.

A diagram showing the first germanium amplifier, using water as an electrolyte. When a potential is applied by the wire on the left, increased current flows across the right-hand circuit.

In specific, Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley of Bell Labs decided to investigate the bulk and surface properties of silicon and germanium. Through a series of experiments, the researchers discovered that by applying a small amount of electricity to the surface of a piece of germanium, it could increase the flow of electricity through a second circuit that was also connected to the piece of germanium — in other words, an amplifier. The earliest germanium amplifiers used liquid electrolytes which would dry up, or were only capable of switching at low frequencies. Then, on December 23 1947, gold contacts were used instead of an electrolyte — and thus the first transistor was born.

South Korea to spend $1.5 billion on 5G mobile network that’s ’1,000 times faster’ than 4G

South Korea, eager to keep its title as the world’s most connected nation, has announced that it will spend $1.5 billion (1.6 trillion won) on rolling out a next-generation mobile 5G network. What actually constitutes a 5G network is a bit nebulous at the moment, but the general consensus is that it would be somewhere between 10 and 1000 times faster than current 4G LTE networks, with download speeds in the region of 100-1000 megabytes per second — fast enough to download a TV episode or movie in a couple of seconds. The South Korean government hopes that by getting ahead of the curve, national chaebols such as Samsung and LG — which represent a significant portion of the country’s entire GDP — will have a competitive edge when other nations get around to rolling out 5G.

What exactly is 5G? That’s a very good question, and as it stands there’s no definitive answer. The ITU, the organization that defines telecoms standards, has only just started looking at the problem and is years away from a 5G specification. Right now, 5G is essentially a catch-all term for the next generation of very-high-speed mobile networks that are being developed by various research groups around the world. There have been very few actual real-world 5G tests. In mid-2013, Samsung set up a “5G” wireless link capable of 1Gbps (100MB/sec) over two kilometers (1.2 miles) — but there are scant few details on how Samsung actually pulled it off, and even fewer details of whether the test was actually applicable to mobile applications (it sounds like Samsung used a big van full of batteries and antennae).

If things move quickly, we might have a 5G standard by 2015 or 2016. The South Korean roadmap, following the government’s $1.5 billion investment, wants to see a trial 5G deployment in 2017, and a commercial service by the end of 2020. The main barrier to developing a 5G standard, though, is finding a suitable way of pushing gigabits of data through the air without interfering with other wireless services and without burning through the battery. (Read: World’s fastest wireless network hits 100 gigabits per second, can scale to terabits.)

Generally, as we’ve moved through the generations (1G, 2G, 3G, 4G), most of the speed boosts have come from utilizing larger swaths of bandwidth. LTE-Advanced, the fastest 4G spec out there, uses 100MHz of prime wireless spectrum (2G only used 200KHz by comparison). While we can rely on new MIMO and modulation tech to get us some of the way to 5G, we’re ultimately going to need more bandwidth — and, down in the cellular sweet spot (700-2100MHz) there just isn’t that much bandwidth available. As a result, 5G may have to use higher frequencies (30-90GHz) where there’s a lot more free space — but the millimeter wave frequencies have their own problems (they are very rapidly attenuated by obstacles) that will need to be worked around. (Read: The wireless spectrum crunch, illustrated.)

By spending  $1.5 billion on the project, the South Korean government hopes that it can give Samsung and LG, which own a huge portion of the worldwide smartphone market, a competitive edge when 5G is eventually rolled out in Asia, Europe, and North America. The government also notes that it would like to boost the country’s telecom infrastructure equipment industry, which so far only has 4.4% of the global market (peanuts compared to Samsung’s 30% share of the global handset market). If South Korea can beat the rest of the world to 5G by a couple of years, there could be a huge payout for the country’s hardware companies.

iOS in the Car video is improved navigation

It’s been over half a year since Apple announced iOS in the Car integrationwith over a dozen automakers, and we’ve not heard much from Cupertino about this feature since then. Today, a video leaked that shows off exactly what the interface currently looks like, and it’s quite promising. It’s still just an emulation running in OS X, but it does give us a solid idea of what we can expect from 2014′s in-dash user experience.

In this YouTube video, a developer named Steven Troughton-Smith walks us through the “iOS in the Car” interface with a build designed for iOS 7.0.3. While the build shown here is limited in scope, it does showcase some very valuable information. For example, it does support touchscreens and multiple resolutions, but it doesn’t support third-party apps or multitasking. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to have a virtual keyboard interface either. Instead, voice recognition will serve as the main form of input. Dictation is still handled in the cloud, so hopefully Siri won’t collapse under the pressure.

Of course, these are still early days for Apple’s in-car integration. The software shown in this demonstration is unfinished, and automakers still need to ship iOS-ready models. Even so, The Verge points to a very interesting screenshot provided by an iOS developer by the name of Denis Stas. In this screenshot, he shows the emulator running with the iOS 7.1 beta, and it looks substantially different. The user interface has been thoroughly polished, and the aesthetic better matches the look of Apple’s current UI motifs. If the rest of the software has seen as much work as the user interface, a public release might be in the cards in the next couple of months.

We know that traffic, directions, music, and messaging are all going to be available with Apple’s system, but what about third-party apps? Many of us spend hours in the car every single day, so customized apps and notifications would be welcome additions. It’s also worth noting that Apple’s lackluster mapping solution can’t be swapped out for Google Maps here, and that could turn off a number of wary travelers. If Apple wants iOS in the Car to gain traction in the long run, third-party apps are absolutely a must. How long will we have to wait for Apple to take the hint?

Frankly, the competition is heating up from all sides. Microsoft and Ford have been working together for years with Ford Sync, and Google is teaming up with Audi and Nvidia to move Android directly into the car market. Apple isn’t the only smartphone game in town, and automakers are even working to cut-out the need for smartphone integration with 4G-enabled cars. Apple certainly has its work cut out for it, and each day that goes by without an iOS in-car solution makes it even more difficult for Apple to reach new users. If iOS in the car has any hope for success, Apple needs to release it as soon as humanly possible.