Steam Mutator

Disclaimer: I test this against a real Steam Deck and sometimes manually test this against a MiniForums UM700 and virtualization via QEMU and VMware. This is just an experiment and nothing to be considered stable in any shape or form, run this if you feel adventurous and you expect to have your OS broken for no good reason.

This tool allows for SteamOS to be used with persistent system modifications and AUR packages.

Features

User scripts are shipped with the software to automatically do these things:

• Enable SSH server
• Enable pacman and yay to work properly
• Restore development files necessary to compile software for SteamOS/Steam Deck
• Make SteamOS support non-Deck hardware
• Install SteamOS Homebrew Plugin Loader development version

How is it done?

SteamOS uses RAUC for its update mechanism. I hook into this update mechanism with my own post-install script that scans for user scripts to run additional commands. Examples of such user scripts are shipped with the software.

How to install?

Work in progress, more info soon.

From Git/GitHub source archive

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/etc [--options…]
make

To install to system run make install as root user.

Afterwards, follow the "Manual setup" section below.

From source distribution archive

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/etc [--options…]
make

To install to system run make install as root user.

Afterwards, follow the "Manual setup" section below.

Manual setup

You will have to manually edit the file /etc/rauc/system.conf as follows:

-post-install=/usr/lib/rauc/post-install.sh
+post-install=/usr/local/lib/steamos-permanent-mods/post-install.sh

Now restart rauc by running

sudo systemctl restart rauc

From here onwards new SteamOS updates will run this app and it will copy itself and all configuration over to the new rootfs.

Then go to /etc/steamos-permanent-mods/ and read the README.md file there for more information. You can start using some of the shipped example scripts by symlinking them, for example this would enable the two scripts to restore all stripped files and enable pacman and yay to be fully usable:

ln -s ../../share/steamos-permanent-mods/examples/00-pacman.sh
ln -s ../../share/steamos-permanent-mods/examples/10-pacman-unstrip.sh

I highly encourage you to explore the code of the shipped scripts since there is a lot of included commentary.

If you want to immediately apply these scripts, run the steamos-atomupd-client command that is referenced in the aforementioned readme file:

/usr/sbin/steamos-atomupd-client \
    --manifest /etc/steamos-atomupd/manifest.json -d