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Right now - you really need an up to date distribution. At least SteamOS 3.9 and Linux kernel 7.2, along with having the very latest graphics drivers. Apart from that, there may be other parts of your system that need tweaking to get the Steam Frame wireless Dongle to actually behave and connect properly.
On Valve's official SteamVR-for-Linux GitHub, one of their team is at least going through trying to improve the experience. There's a new "frame-dongle-troubleshoot.sh" script up on there, which continues to be worked on, and it might help you figure out where your issues are.
From the script:
"This is a very quickly-written script to try to track down and spot the most-commonly-seen problems with using the Steam Frame wireless dongle on Linux. As new things turn up, the script will be revised."
Valve's problem is that with many different Linux distributions with different versions of kernels, drivers and so on - there's often no one-size fits-all solution.
To use it, you can simply download the .sh from the GitHub, make it executable and run it via your favourite terminal app. For example, it tells me this right away:
liamdawe@fedora:~$ /home/liamdawe/Downloads/frame-dongle-troubleshoot.sh
-- Steam Frame Wireless Dongle Troubleshooting script v0.3
--
-- Lines beginning with PROBLEM are issues which will prevent the dongle from working.
-- Lines beginning with INFO may not prevent the dongle from working, but are worth looking into.
PROBLEM:DRIVER: While you're on a recent enough kernel, the rtw89 driver appears to be missing and may not have been compiled for your distro.
PROBLEM:REGDOMAIN: Your regulatory domain is set to 00 and using the DFS-UNSET rules set. Set an appropriate regulatory domain for your location.
Useful to know before I manage to actually get one if Valve ever move me from the waitlist.
Are you also waiting on getting a Steam Frame? Be sure to join the Waiting Room in the GamingOnLinux Forum.
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Are you one of the lucky people who got the new Steam Frame?Not yet. 😄
Good to see that Valve is working on it though.
It does make me wonder how distros deal with that. Why is it not set up immediately when selecting the time zone? Does anything else need it? Is it only dealt with when you have a radio in your PC (which I don't)? And of course I need to now see what the proper way is to make this permanent.
Valve's problem is that with many different Linux distributions with different versions of kernels, drivers and so on - there's often no one-size fits-all solution.They could have upstreamed the driver they needed early enough so that most distros would already have it by the time the hardware launched (which is what Intel used to do). They've known what was in their dongle for a long time. Let the distros know which regulatory regime they're expecting to have configured. Then the user-facing instruction is simply "don't forget to turn WiFi on!"
Quoting: EhvisThis was certainly an interesting one. When I plugged in the dongle, it "appeared to work". Network manager saw it, it gave me Wifi networks and both Steam PC and the Steam Frame were able to pair to it. However, actually using it for anything did not work. Good thing that Liam pointed to a previous article that mentioned the regulatory domain thing, which is what fixed it.I had a more embarrassing situation. I got the regulatory domain changed, but it still wouldn't work. It turned out, I had wifi off since I normally use a wired connection for internet. It didn't occur to me that the wifi switch in KDE also controlled the dongle.
It does make me wonder how distros deal with that. Why is it not set up immediately when selecting the time zone? Does anything else need it? Is it only dealt with when you have a radio in your PC (which I don't)? And of course I need to now see what the proper way is to make this permanent.
Are you one of the lucky people who got the new Steam Frame?It has left the logistics center...
Also I still have remaining problems unrelated to the dongle I couldn't yet tackle, which are:
* The controllers do not appear in game for the games I tested (Arizona Sunshine VR Remake and Arizona Sunshine VR 2) so I could move my head and saw the surroundings but couldn't actually do something.
* The game The Midnight Walk always launched in 2D on my desktop no matter which start option I chose.
At least the latter was working previously when using Steam Link on a Meta Quest 3. However there has been some time between and updates to all sorts of stuff so I still have to cross check if at least that still works for me and then submitting a proper bugreport with all the required logs. And also test if it might be sunshine interefering somehow.
