that’s fair!
After switching to the new configuration that has programs.steam.enable = true
, steam installs itself upon starting it and I do
sudo setcap CAP_SYS_NICE+ep ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrcompositor-launcher
to avoid an error message upon startup of SteamVR, but this aesthetics, as far as I understand.
There is no further config for me, at the moment.
In the process of troubleshooting I switched to the latest stable NixOS channel, 21.11, ran
nix-channel --update
and
nixos-rebuild boot --upgrade
,
then rebooted.
I got rid of these three lines:
kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages_5_4;
blacklistedKernelModules = [ "rtl8xxxu" ];
extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [ rtl8192eu ];
that I needed for an external wifi antena from TP link. Removing those, I allowed an upgrade to a more recent linux kernel, at the cost of not having wifi (which I luckily do not rely on, anymore). I haven’t tried if now SteamVR would still work switching back to that old, modified kernel.
SteamVR now works in its current verion 1.20, however, the settings dialogue of SteamVR only shows up reliably in the version “1.21.6 beta”.
I then continued my original plan of installing simulavr, which I am quite enthusiastic about. The simula installations instruction (including NixOS) are quite short and in the file my-path-to-the-simula-git-repo/config/config.dhall
I had to change “OpenXR” to “OpenVR” and to my amazement, it simulavr just worked.
So my actual configuration is now very short, no tweaks, no custom hacks.
- SteamVR and simula start up reliably since then on the first try, no issues so far.
- the SteamVR overlay works, I can start VR apps from within VR
- my virtual hands and the models of the controllers are rendered correctly and reliably, no problem
A major source of annoyance is the very opaque error that everyone seems to encounter at some point (307) and which does not give any clue about what’s malconfigured, and thus I still don’t know what exactly caused the problem.
On top of this, my vr headset still does not show in the output of xrandr
, neither in the output of xrandr --verbose | grep desktop
. For this reason, I can’t tell what resolution/framerate I actually have. From what I see within the 3D world and simulavr, my resolution is correct and my framerate is at 120 Hz according to the console output of simula … at some point in future I will want to know for sure and set it to 144 Hz, but for now I am fine.