steam will not work under lmde 2 in virtualbox
 

Steam won't start in lmde 2 in virtualbox. It installs fine but when you click the icon on the desktop it won't start the app. I'm thinking that it has something to do with the 3d drivers but 3d is turned on in virtualbox. any ideas or work arounds for this issue?

Start Steam from the commandline and see which errors you get. But honestly, running Steam in a VM doesn't make much sense, unless you only want to play older games that are not demanding on the graphics card or use features that the VM graphics adapter won't provide.

yes i just wanted to play some older games nothing crazy.

here is the output on command line.

Running Steam on linuxmint 2 64-bit
STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(0_client)
libGL error: failed to get magic
libGL error: failed to load driver: vboxvideo
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

then it just hangs there.

I don't think that Steam can use the virtual graphics card that VirtualBox provides so I think the simple to this is that you can't run Steam in VirtualBox. There may be a way using IOMMU and passing through a graphics card but I think that would be fraught with problems and last time I looked I could see no evidence of it being done, though that was a while ago.
Surely you could just run Steam on the native OS on the PC?

yes i can but i would rather run linux mint. i'm on my work computer and love linux mint so i thought i would give it a shot. work computer uses windows 7 which would work fine but prefer linux.

I am not sure if it wouldn't work at all, may be worth a try. Have you installed the Guest Extensions? Seems to me they are missing.

i just installed guest additions and it installed without a hitch but steam will not open still

Do you get the same error messages?

yes i got the same output. thinking it probably not going to work. I'm not sure why you have to have a 3d card just to run the steam app though. I can understand having to have one to play your games but not the steam app.

I have no idea but your experience using Steam is the same as my own. Have you tried a 32 bit gues though? I've a feeling that didn't work last time I tried either but it may be more likely to(if you're missing the 32 bit VB drivers on a 65 bit install, perhaps)?

i've tried the fix on the ubuntu forums now and it still didn't work.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2233005

i'm not understanding the reason this still isn't working? If you can run steam on android phones there is no reason you can't run steam in a virtual machine

I don't use Mint but as you have the Debian Stable version this may apply:
https://wiki.debian.org/Steam

Basically, you need to add multiarch support for 32-bit.

when you install steam it installs the packages it needs. Mint also comes preinstalled with the i386 arch