I thought I would write a guide for this as I struggled to get this working for a couple of days having to scrounge together scraps of information from various threads. It's actually not too difficult to do, and it works very well, but there are a couple of gotchas along the way.
First off, a note on my setup:
I'm running Pop_OS 22.04 with the latest NVidia Driver 545 on an RTX 4090.
Ubuntu should work fine for this also as Pop_OS is a fork of Ubuntu.
I did try Nobara as well, but the steam install for that seemed a bit broken and I wasn't able to get it to work there.
The key components you need to make this work are:
- Sidequest
- ALVR
- Lutris
- Steam + SteamVR
- VaM
I have been a long time linux user, but was completely new to attempting to run games on Linux, let alone VR.
The first thing I struggled with was installing ALVR and getting that running properly. However, I did get it working by doing the following.
First download Sidequest and use the Advanced Installation found at https://sidequestvr.com/setup-howto.
I found their tutorial (
) helpful too. It walks you through the process.
Once you have Sidequest installed on your headset use it to sideload ALVR (https://sidequestvr.com/app/9/alvr-air-light-vr) onto the headset.
Next you need to get ALVR running on your desktop. I got really confused and went in circles attempting to follow the installation guide https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/wiki/Installation-guide. The Distrobox installation mentioned just didn't work for me, and in the end what I needed to do was go to https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/releases download the AppImage of the latest release, once downloaded right click on it and go to properties tab and make it executable, then simply double click to run it.
I actually had some trouble getting ALVR to work at this point. The first problem was even when I ran ALVR on both the headset and the desktop, it failed to automatically detect the client, so I had to add the client manually. In the headset when running ALVR it shows the url and IP address of the client, and there's a button you can click in ALVR on the desktop to manually add the client (including the IP address) if it doesn't automatically detect it. I also got a little confused when running the initial setup wizard in ALVR on the desktop when you try to add firewall rules and it shows an error, apparently this is normal and it just doesn't work, but that doesn't prevent you from succeeding. The other error I had when I tried to run SteamVR was related to audio. ALVR was failing to connect to SteamVR citing an error about pipewire, so I worked around that in ALVR by going to the settings and changing it from pipewire to none for both the audio and the microphone. This means I have no sound, but at least I can connect to SteamVR. I'm sure someone will chime in on how to solve this in the comments.
Next thing is to get Steam and SteamVR. There are many different ways you can install Steam, but I found success by downloading the .deb installer from https://store.steampowered.com/about/. After installing Steam from the .deb when you open it up you need to go to the store and search for SteamVR and install it from there. At this point in time only the stable version of SteamVR worked for me, when I tried running the SteamVR beta, it didn't work. At this point I was able to run VR games by opening ALVR on the headset, running it on the desktop, clicking Launch SteamVR in ALVR and then it would launch into SteamVR Home on the headset. Great. The problem was SteamVR home is a steaming pile of poop, and I found it better to disable it. I can't remember how I did that, but there is a setting that allows you do that and instead allows you to just browse your game library like a normal person would.
Next up it's time to actually install VAM. I struggled with this initially trying to download VaM_Updater.exe from the Patreon like you would on Windows etc, but that didn't work out well. Instead, I found success after installing Lutris and then visiting https://lutris.net/games/virt-a-mate/ and clicking Install, which opens Lutris and then installs VAM. Once it's installed then in Lutris select the Virt-a-Mate shortcut it created, and click the Wine icon down the bottom and click winetricks then install corefonts via winetricks in order to solve a problem with invisible text.
The final step in actually getting it working is to realize that you can't run it through Lutris, so don't bother trying.
Lutris will have installed VAM to ~/Games/virt-a-mate/drive_c/vam/VaM.exe, so you need to go into Steam
add VAM.exe as a non-steam game. Then go to the properties and set the following options.
On the shortcut tab in the launch options put "-vrmode OpenVR" (you need to include the quotes too) and check 'include in VR library'.
Then on the compatibility tab select 'Force use of a specific compatibility tool' and select Proton 8.04.
If this option isn't available you may need to first go into the overall Steam settings and on the compatibility tab there
make sure you have selected "Enable Steam Play for all other titles".
You should now be able to play VaM on SteamVR in Linux. If you find VaM.exe doesn't appear right away in your steam library when browsing your library in the headset in VR, just try closing Steam and restarting it, and/or restart your PC and it should show up.
Enjoy!
First off, a note on my setup:
I'm running Pop_OS 22.04 with the latest NVidia Driver 545 on an RTX 4090.
Ubuntu should work fine for this also as Pop_OS is a fork of Ubuntu.
I did try Nobara as well, but the steam install for that seemed a bit broken and I wasn't able to get it to work there.
The key components you need to make this work are:
- Sidequest
- ALVR
- Lutris
- Steam + SteamVR
- VaM
I have been a long time linux user, but was completely new to attempting to run games on Linux, let alone VR.
The first thing I struggled with was installing ALVR and getting that running properly. However, I did get it working by doing the following.
First download Sidequest and use the Advanced Installation found at https://sidequestvr.com/setup-howto.
I found their tutorial (
Once you have Sidequest installed on your headset use it to sideload ALVR (https://sidequestvr.com/app/9/alvr-air-light-vr) onto the headset.
Next you need to get ALVR running on your desktop. I got really confused and went in circles attempting to follow the installation guide https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/wiki/Installation-guide. The Distrobox installation mentioned just didn't work for me, and in the end what I needed to do was go to https://github.com/alvr-org/ALVR/releases download the AppImage of the latest release, once downloaded right click on it and go to properties tab and make it executable, then simply double click to run it.
I actually had some trouble getting ALVR to work at this point. The first problem was even when I ran ALVR on both the headset and the desktop, it failed to automatically detect the client, so I had to add the client manually. In the headset when running ALVR it shows the url and IP address of the client, and there's a button you can click in ALVR on the desktop to manually add the client (including the IP address) if it doesn't automatically detect it. I also got a little confused when running the initial setup wizard in ALVR on the desktop when you try to add firewall rules and it shows an error, apparently this is normal and it just doesn't work, but that doesn't prevent you from succeeding. The other error I had when I tried to run SteamVR was related to audio. ALVR was failing to connect to SteamVR citing an error about pipewire, so I worked around that in ALVR by going to the settings and changing it from pipewire to none for both the audio and the microphone. This means I have no sound, but at least I can connect to SteamVR. I'm sure someone will chime in on how to solve this in the comments.
Next thing is to get Steam and SteamVR. There are many different ways you can install Steam, but I found success by downloading the .deb installer from https://store.steampowered.com/about/. After installing Steam from the .deb when you open it up you need to go to the store and search for SteamVR and install it from there. At this point in time only the stable version of SteamVR worked for me, when I tried running the SteamVR beta, it didn't work. At this point I was able to run VR games by opening ALVR on the headset, running it on the desktop, clicking Launch SteamVR in ALVR and then it would launch into SteamVR Home on the headset. Great. The problem was SteamVR home is a steaming pile of poop, and I found it better to disable it. I can't remember how I did that, but there is a setting that allows you do that and instead allows you to just browse your game library like a normal person would.
Next up it's time to actually install VAM. I struggled with this initially trying to download VaM_Updater.exe from the Patreon like you would on Windows etc, but that didn't work out well. Instead, I found success after installing Lutris and then visiting https://lutris.net/games/virt-a-mate/ and clicking Install, which opens Lutris and then installs VAM. Once it's installed then in Lutris select the Virt-a-Mate shortcut it created, and click the Wine icon down the bottom and click winetricks then install corefonts via winetricks in order to solve a problem with invisible text.
The final step in actually getting it working is to realize that you can't run it through Lutris, so don't bother trying.
Lutris will have installed VAM to ~/Games/virt-a-mate/drive_c/vam/VaM.exe, so you need to go into Steam
add VAM.exe as a non-steam game. Then go to the properties and set the following options.
On the shortcut tab in the launch options put "-vrmode OpenVR" (you need to include the quotes too) and check 'include in VR library'.
Then on the compatibility tab select 'Force use of a specific compatibility tool' and select Proton 8.04.
If this option isn't available you may need to first go into the overall Steam settings and on the compatibility tab there
make sure you have selected "Enable Steam Play for all other titles".
You should now be able to play VaM on SteamVR in Linux. If you find VaM.exe doesn't appear right away in your steam library when browsing your library in the headset in VR, just try closing Steam and restarting it, and/or restart your PC and it should show up.
Enjoy!