Installation of Steam Client on Debian Jessie 8 Linux 64-bit

This article describes an installation of the Valve Steam Linux client on Debian 8 Jessie 64bit. The article assumes that you have already installed your VGA drives required to run Steam client. Let's start with steam client download:

$ wget http://media.steampowered.com/client/installer/steam.deb

Once you have client downloaded install the steam.deb package. Please not the below command requires root privileges and will show errors due to the dependency problems which we will address next:

# dpkg -i steam.deb
Selecting previously unselected package steam-launcher.
(Reading database ... 82762 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack steam.deb ...
Unpacking steam-launcher (1.0.0.49) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of steam-launcher:
 steam-launcher depends on curl; however: 
  Package curl is not installed.
 steam-launcher depends on zenity; however:   
  Package zenity is not installed. 
                                            
dpkg: error processing package steam-launcher (--install): 
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.58) ...   
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.13-1) ...  
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.0.2-5) ... 
Errors were encountered while processing:  
 steam-launcher   

Now we are going to install all dependencies required to install Steam client:

# apt-get -f install 

The above command should successfully install steam client on your system. However, to run steam client you will first need to install few additional 32-bit libraries. For this we need to enable multi-arch:

# dpkg --add-architecture i386
# apt-get update

Next, install all required 32bit libraries:

# apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libc6:i386

Depending on your graphic card installation you may need to install binary OpenGL 32-bit libraries otherwise you will see an error message when you attempt to start steam client:

You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run:
libGL.so.1

To resolve this issue we need to install OpenGL 32-bit libraries suitable for our VGA type:

NVIDIA:
# apt-get install libgl1-nvidia-glx-i386
ATI/AMD:
# apt-get install  libgl1-fglrx-glx-i386

You mat now start your steam client:

$ steam