14 DAY TRIAL // Just a few moments ago, April 13, 2016, Valve pushed a new Beta build of the next major SteamOS Debian-based operating system for gamers to the brewmaster_beta channel.
SteamOS 2.68 Brewmaster Beta comes three weeks after the previous Beta build, version 2.67, which added fixes to the built-in PulseAudio sound server, the GRUB bootloader, and the The Talos Principle game.
There aren't many interesting changes in the SteamOS 2.68 Beta update, with the exception of the fact that the operating system has been rebased on the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 "Jessie" distribution.
"A handful of minor updates to sync with the Debian 8.4 release and the usual collection of security fixes," said one of Valve's SteamOS developers in today's announcement.
Security fixes, software updates
Thanks to the rebase to the upstream Debian GNU/Linux 8.4 software repositories, SteamOS now brings a new version of the APT package manager, the espeakup lightweight connector for espeak and speakup, the GnuPG free replacement for PGP, as well as initramfs-tools and sane-backends.
As usual, some of the packages included in SteamOS have been updated to patch various security fixes, which have been noted in the official release announcement. Among these, we can mention Cairo, GTK+ 2.0, imlib2, librsvg, libsndfile, PCRE3, SRTP, Nettle, and tzdata.
Lastly, Valve engineers added the devscripts and fakeroot packages to SteamOS to fix an issue with build dependencies that weren't included in the main repositories. Those who live on the bleeding edge can download today's SteamOS 2.68 Brewmaster Beta ISO images right now via our website.
Please try to keep in mind that this is a Beta version of SteamOS and it's not recommended for use in production environments. It is here only for early adopters who want to help Valve find and fix potential issues.