Yes, There Are Portal 2 Linux References

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 20 April 2011 at 11:02 PM EDT. 51 Comments
PHORONIX
I'm only mentioning this so readers will hopefully stop emailing me regarding the references that have been discovered within Valve's Mac OS X launcher to their new Portal 2 game regarding Linux support.

It's already been mentioned on the Phoronix Forums, Valve Forums, and elsewhere, but I've now received at a dozen or two e-mails, Facebook messages, etc of readers informing me about the Linux checks within Valve's Mac OS X Portal 2 client. They keep flowing in and in hopes of them stopping, I'm posting this message now.

Unlike Garry's Mod that ended up being for Linux servers (Garry's original comments were in fact unclear), this in fact is for the client. It's just like the Linux client checks that were discovered last year when the Steam client beta emerged on Mac OS X and before discovering the actual Steam Linux client binaries that partially worked.

There's also the Postal III game that's running on Source and is expected to have a Linux client at some point as well.


The unreleased Steam Linux client and where it was at last summer.


Portal 2, Valve's extremely popular first-person puzzle-platform game built atop the Source Engine, was released this week to succeed the original Portal game from 2007.

It basically comes down to this reference in the Portal 2 Mac OS X client for its launcher:
#determine platform
UNAME=`uname`
if [ "$UNAME" == "Darwin" ]; then
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="${GAMEROOT}"/bin:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
elif [ "$UNAME" == "Linux" ]; then
# prepend our lib path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${GAMEROOT}"/bin:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
fi

Which for the non-programmers, is basically for setting the library path on Linux prior to initializing the game.

I hadn't mentioned these Portal 2 Linux references previously since it's just like the ones last year in the Mac OS X client. It basically just shows that Valve indeed is working towards Linux. And regarding Steam / Source on Linux, there are basically two factions among the Phoronix reader base: those that believe me when I say Steam/Source for Linux I have confirmed and those that don't yet believe it's coming in the foreseeable future. The lines are drawn; there is not much more to add until the client publicly ships.


Is there a reason to celebrate?


Is it taking longer than what was originally expected when mentioning some of the Steam/Source-related items on Phoronix in the past? Yes, but it's still coming -- based upon public and private information.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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