Steamify CachyOS ISO for the Steam Machine

A CachyOS desktop ISO for the Valve Steam Machine with Steamify built in:

• The live session has the Steam Machine drivers (power-off fix).
• The installer ("CachyOS with Steamify Installer") has a Steamify page where you pick the options and whether the PC starts in gaming mode or on the desktop. Steamify is applied during the install.

Choose KDE Plasma in the installer. Steamify only works with KDE Plasma (the default). With another desktop (GNOME, Hyprland, Cosmic, ...) Steamify is not supported.

Building the ISO yourself

You need about 20 GB of free space, and a Linux PC with podman (or Docker: replace podman with docker). The build runs in CachyOS's own container, so the PC doesn't have to run CachyOS.

git clone -b feat/steamify https://github.com/theupriser/steamify-cachyos-live-iso
cd steamify-cachyos-live-iso

# Put Steamify on the ISO: the newest release. To use your own checkout,
# pass its path: ./steamify-prepare.sh ~/steamify-cachyos
./steamify-prepare.sh

mkdir -p ~/iso-cache    # downloaded packages, kept for the next build
sudo podman run --rm -t --privileged --network=host \
  --pids-limit=-1 --ulimit nofile=65536:65536 \
  -v ~/iso-cache:/var/cache/pacman/pkg -v "$PWD":/iso -w /iso \
  docker.io/cachyos/cachyos:latest bash -c '
    pacman-key --init && pacman-key --populate &&
    pacman -Syu --noconfirm --needed archiso mkinitcpio-archiso git squashfs-tools grub sudo &&
    ./build-live-modules.sh && ./build-calamares-modules.sh &&
    ./buildiso.sh -p desktop -w'

The ISO is written to out/desktop/steamify-cachyos-<date>.iso. Write it to a USB stick (for example with dd or Fedora Media Writer) and boot the Steam Machine from it.

Why these steps:

• build-live-modules.sh builds the power-off fix for the ISO's kernels. Without it, the Steam Machine starts up again right after shutting down.
• build-calamares-modules.sh builds the installer module that shows the Steamify page. CachyOS's installer package leaves it out.
• --pids-limit=-1 and --ulimit nofile=... are needed because pacman runs out of processes or open files in the container otherwise (GPGME errors).
• --network=host gives the container DNS.
• -w removes the build folder afterwards. Before building again, run sudo rm -rf build out.

To build on CachyOS directly, without a container, install the same packages with pacman and run the three scripts with sudo.

---

The notes below are from CachyOS's original repository.

These are the basic needed files and folders to build CachyOS system.

buildiso

buildiso is used to build CachyOS ISO.

Arguments

$ ./buildiso.sh -h
Usage: buildiso [options]
    -c                 Disable clean work dir
    -r                 Disable building in RAM on systems with more than 23GB RAM
    -w                 Remove build directory (not the ISO) after ISO file is built
    -h                 This help
    -p <profile>       Buildset or profile [default: desktop]
    -v                 Verbose output to log file, show profile detail (-q)

• Uses the same signature that normal repo and has no mirrors package to install.

sudo pacman -Syy

Install necessary packages:

sudo pacman -S archiso mkinitcpio-archiso git squashfs-tools grub --needed

Clone:

git clone https://github.com/cachyos/cachyos-live-iso.git cachyos-archiso
cd cachyos-archiso

Build

sudo ./buildiso.sh -p desktop -v -w

As the result iso appears at the out folder