Hey guys how goes it?
I have a rpi 2 that is not being used at the moment, and at home I have a data cap from Comcast which keeps me from downloading games liberally, but at my dad's business he has Windstream which is slow but does not have a data cap. I was wondering if there is a way to connect the rpi2 with an external HDD attached to the business network and SSH into it to download Steam games onto the external, then transfer them to my PC. I have Ubuntu Gnome (thanks Wendell!) as well as Windows 7 64 bit on my PC at home. I will worry about the transferring of the game files later, so could I use putty to access the rpi's GUI to download the games or would it be easier to do on Ubuntu? Also, what are some of the complications I may run into trying to do this, is there an easier way without using an actual PC at the business?
*the transferring of games will be done from the external to my main PC, I'll just go grab the external. Not download them from the rpi, hopefully I didn't give the impression of a facepalm worthy plan! :P
Thanks for the help!
You can download games with steam on one computer then copy the contents of the steam library directory to another and load them in steam. That works fine. But the problem you will run in to here is that the linux version of the games is not the same as the windows version, so you won't be able to copy them across and use them.
I'm not sure if there's a way to download steam game files outside of steam but I kind of doubt it. I think you may have to do this with a windows machine.
You'll need to install Steam on Qemu in order to download the Windows or Linux versions of the games you want. Trasnfer them from the external HDD to the computer is easy and you can do it without any problem. If you want to access the files you downloaded just connect the RPi at home in the same network and use Filezilla to connect to SFTP using port 22 and the credentials you have to access to the RPi through SSH. The HDD will be mounted in the media directory in the root folder of the Raspberry, if you're using Raspbian.
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If the PI has a plain linuxsystem (like raspbian or what is the debian called?) you could install Steam, tigervnc and connect via vnc+ssh to the remote pi. Fire up the Steam client and download what you want (I think you can actually choose to show you the non-linux games and download them, without being able to start them)
Now pick some way to transfer the data from the remote PI to your local PC and you are done.
All under the assumption that you have a LAN connection to the PI, otherwise all this would not make sense.
You can also set up the pi as a vpn server or client if you don't have access to forward ports on the business' networking equipment.
The problem I see here is that the Pi uses an ARM processor, so Steam won't run at all unless Valve or someone else compiled it for ARM instead of x86. That doesn't even mention the differences between the Linux and Windows versions of the games you want to download.
Best to use an old Windows based computer.
Yeah I didn't think about that, I may not have access because the router/modem is a Windstream brand and I'm not 100% sure that I can tamper with the settings.
Thanks for the reply, I was thinking the pi at first just to save space because our office isn't huge. Could I not do what @the193rd said and download the games through steam for Windows OR Linux, the aim here is just to get the files and transfer them to my PC at home from my external drive.
@khaudio Could I connect another router to the modem and forward ports on that to access the pi?
Thanks for the replies everybody, by the way
Nah; you'll just be 2 layers deep in the same hole.
Oh, wait- you said modem, not switch. I don't think it will work. I'm not the person to ask about that, though.
Well I made a huge mistake not considering the fact that Steam doesn't support the ARM based architecture that rpi is built on, drat. Well, thanks for the replies.
I may go a different direction and attempt to make an ubuntu live usb drive that is large enough, and persistent, to ssh into and install games to via the PC at our business. I know I could do something easier, but it wouldn't be as fun would it? :P
Or maybe just a mini-box PC that has an Atom cpu? That would be pretty simple as well.
I think it will be a lot easy doing this on a Windows system and using remote desktop to control it. This way you can download the windows version of games. Like someone else mentioned you can use qemu and use VMs to have the different versions, or maybe even use wine.
If you can't open ports on the router a simple sollution is to run a vpn server on your computer at home and have the remote machine connect to you, then you can access it using whatever you like over the VPN and not worry about port forwarding on the business router.
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@Dexter_Kane
Thanks for the idea. :)
I wasn't aware of the architecture of the rpi until now, but anywho. Your solution seems like a much better idea because I wouldn't be spending any $$$ unnecessarily, and it would be much easier to implement.
*edit
I was looking for an excuse to try to solve a problem with Linux really, just to do some learning. I guess not understanding what something is good for would make it harder to use, maybe I should start somewhere else...