03 Jun 2026

feedPlanet Debian

Emmanuel Kasper: Running Linux i386 binary (steamcmd) via debootstrap foreign chroot

The Steam command line client, which I need to download the game data for the Doom3 BFG shooter, is only available as an Linux i386 binary. As my main home computer is an arm64 box, this could be an issue, but today we have no less than three different ways to run a Linux i386 binary on arm64: Fex, Box32/64 and the older qemu-user mode. According to the Box64 benchmarks, qemu-user is the slowest of the three. But since this is only to run a command line tool downloader, where network speed is the bottleneck, this doesn't matter a lot.

Running steamcmd outside of a chroot via qemu-user and dpkg multiarch support was failing me with the error i386-binfmt-P: Could not open '/lib/ld-linux.so.2': No such file or directory even after installing the i386 libc. So I went the way of qemu-user and a chroot environment, a bit more convoluted but I can run any i386 binaries there in the future.

Create a debian-i386 chroot environment via deboostrap:

$ sudo apt install qemu-user qemu-user-binfmt debootstrap
$ fakeroot debootstrap --foreign --arch=i386 debian-i386
$ sudo chroot debian-i386
# inside the chroot 
# /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage 
# exit

Add needed mounts to run binaries inside the chroot:

$ sudo mount --bind /dev/ debian-i386/dev/
$ sudo mount --bind /dev/pts debian-i386/dev/pts
$ sudo mount -t proc none  debian-i386/proc/

Install steamcmd in the chroot client:

$ sudo chroot debian-i386

# export LANG=C
# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
# apt update && apt install --yes steamcmd 
# useradd --create-home --shell /bin/bash steam
# su - steam
$ steamcmd 
... will download an updated version of the tool, and print a lot of tracing information

Steam> quit

From now on you can follow the Doom3 BFG instructions to download the game data.

Once you exit the chroot, the game data will be available at debian-i386/home/steam/

03 Jun 2026 8:50am GMT

02 Jun 2026

feedPlanet Debian

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in May 2026

This was a particularly busy month for me in terms of Debian contributions.

It started with a week in Hamburg for the MiniDebConf. I talked to many colleagues face-to-face and worked on various bugs and maintenance tasks. I'm pleased to have finally found the time to reproduce and fix the boot-time crashes in the parallel port subsystem that have been reported many times recently.

A series of easily exploited kernel LPE (local privilege execution) issues were published this month, mostly with very little coordination with distributions. Salvatore and I had to upload fixes for these at roughly weekly intervals. All of these fixes needed to be applied to 4 different upstream branches (currently 5.10, 6.1, 6.12, and 7.0) and 7 Debian branches (including backports).

02 Jun 2026 2:17pm GMT

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in 2025

This was a particularly busy month for me in terms of Debian contributions.

It started with a week in Hamburg for the MiniDebConf. I talked to many colleagues face-to-face and worked on various bugs and maintenance tasks. I'm pleased to have finally found the time to reproduce and fix the boot-time crashes in the parallel port subsystem that have been reported many times recently.

A series of easily exploited kernel LPE (local privilege execution) issues were published this month, mostly with very little coordination with distributions. Salvatore and I had to upload fixes for these at roughly weekly intervals. All of these fixes needed to be applied to 4 different upstream branches (currently 5.10, 6.1, 6.12, and 7.0) and 7 Debian branches (including backports).

02 Jun 2026 2:17pm GMT