Steam Remote Play can’t detect controller

[GnollhideMember]

Hello! I found antiX while looking for a lightweight distro for my laptop, and I’ve been enjoying having a project to toy around with. One thing that’s stumped me is controllers and steam. I saw the recommendation to add my user to the input group and that let me use my controller on my local steam, but when attempting to stream games via Steam Remote Play it doesn’t register any inputs, neither in-game or for the Steam overlay. It’s a USB controller, an offbrand generic controller that uses a ps2 controller with a USB adapter, and steam can detect it as generic after the user group fix and I’m able to set it up, but it seems to only work on local games. Any idea where I should start digging to fix this?

[Xunzi_23Member]

Hi Gnollhide, welcome to the forum

Have you already added a rule to /etc/udev/rules/d, you must do that as root.

It must kook like below but with your device vendor and product id.
Device id is easy to find using lsusb command in the terminal

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="22d9", ATTR{idProduct}=="2769", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"

If you have activated the firewall UFW you will need to open required ports for steam.

Please let us know how you get on. Steam controller connection info would be useful to other users.

[GnollhideMember]

I added the udev rule but it didn’t seem to make a difference even after reboot, should I add it to the host PC as well? It’s possible I also got vendor id and product id backwards on the custom rule but I put it in as I thought would make sense (vendor, then product) as reported by lsusb. If it matters, Moonlight was unable to see the controller until I added a custom SDL mapping in its controller mappings, then it was able to see and use it no problem, so worst case scenario I can always use Moonlight instead of Steam if I can’t get the controller streaming to work.

EDIT: I also don’t have the firewall enabled, and all of this is on local network. The host PC is connected via ethernet and this laptop is connected via Wi-Fi.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by Gnollhide.

[Xunzi_23Member]

MMM, seems we have to go back to the beginning.

What have you installed, how is the steam controller software installed.
Below lists steps and requirements.

https://linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-steam-on-debian-linux/

You may have run in to the bug described under
https://steamcommunity.com/app/4165870/discussions/1/833873623246777823/

[GnollhideMember]

That might be the problem, I installed steam via the antiX software installer so if that bug is correct I just need to uninstall and reinstall via the .deb from valve, I’ll do that and report back on how that works. I installed steam long ago on the host pc so I don’t remember which exactly I used, but I’m fairly sure I did download the .deb from valve for that one, so it might just be as simple as incompatibility between the steam versions.

EDIT: Changing to store.steampowered’s version of steam.deb didn’t change the outcome, and attempting to install steam-devices via terminal attempts to remove the steam installation that I just put on there, so I don’t know if that is an option I can go for.

• This reply was modified 3 months, 3 weeks ago by Gnollhide.

[Xunzi_23Member]

First question, have you tried running steam as root, permissions can be an issue.
There is an open bug report for that.

Please also ask for help on the steam community site, many in that community should have way more
knowledge/first hand experience regarding steam issues and tweaks.

[GnollhideMember]

Sorry for being away, was dealing with family stuff. First off, I haven’t tried running steam as root, but attempting to just use sudo steam causes the error “Cannot run as root.” so I don’t know if that’s doable as a fix. I haven’t asked for help on steam community yet, I will now though to see if anyone has had similar issues to me.

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