Valve’s much-ballyhooed expansion of the
Source engine and Steam to the Linux world just took a major step forward with the announcement of a private external beta. If you’re running Ubuntu, you could be one of the lucky 1,000 users to take Steam and a Valve game for a spin sometime in October. Of course, if you’re really lucky, you’re probably gearing up for the private internal beta, which starts next week.
Mere mortals can watch the Valve Linux team
blog for the sign-up sheet, which has yet to be posted. In a blog post today, the team says that, while Big Picture mode won’t be available in the beta, you’ll have everything you need:
Steam and a Valve game. The team doesn’t say which game that will be, but given that it has been working with Left 4 Dead 2 lately, that seems to be a likely candidate.

Left 4 Dead 2, which Valve has been focusing on as it moves Steam and Source to Linux.
You’ll be responsible for having a system with Ubuntu 12.04 or newer and for knowing what you’re doing with Linux. The team will make a 64-bit version of the software available at some future date (and hasn’t said that it will be part of this beta) and also plans to have an improved user install at some point down the road. The team stresses that
Ubuntu won’t be the only Linux distro as things progress, but that it wants to stick to Ubuntu for now, to make testing and changes more efficient.
Joshua Gulick
Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to
Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote
CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for
Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for
HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.