Valve's Steam Controller needs some tweaking

Oct 17, 2015 03:00 GMT  ·  By

While set to arrive in various markets in the European Union, Asia, Australia, and USA, the early adopters have already started to receive the outstanding Steam Controller device from Valve, the company behind the well-known Steam digital game store.

If you play games, no matter the operating system used, you know what Steam is and you've most probably heard about that awesome Steam Controller device that every player on this Earth wants to have around their gaming environments.

As one might have expected, because there's always has to be an issue with new devices on Linux OSes, those who received the Steam Controller and were using a Linux kernel-based computer operating system, such as Arch Linux or Ubuntu, have reported issues with the device, as it couldn't be used correctly after plug-in.

The problem appears to be with the Steam for Linux client, which does not properly detect the Steam Controller due to udev rules. Therefore, packagers of the Steam for Linux client need to update it in their GNU/Linux distributions with the instructions provided below.

Here's a temporary workaround

The following instructions, posted in the Arch Linux bug tracker, apply to the Arch Linux and Ubuntu distributions, but they should work on any other GNU/Linux operating system. To get started, open a Terminal, run a graphical text editor as root (e.g. sudo gedit) and paste the following code:

code
#USB devices
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="28de", MODE="0666"
After pasting the code above, save the file with the name "99-steam-controller-permission.rules" (without quotes) in the /etc/udev/rules.d folder. That's it! You should now be able to use your Steam Controller with the Steam for Linux client. Have fun and don't hesitate to drop a comment below if the workaround was useful of you or not.