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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • In this year of 2025? No. But it still is basically setting oneself for failure from the perspective of Graphene, IMO. Like, the strongest protection in the world (assuming Graphene even is, which is quite a tall order statement) is useless if it only works on the mornings of a Tuesday that falls in a prime number day that has a blue moon and where there are no ATP tennis matches going on. Everyone else is, like, living in the real world, and the uniqueness of your scenario is going to go down the drain once your users get presented with a $5 wrench, or even cheaper: a waterboard. Because cops, let alone ICE, are not going to stop to ask you if they can make you more comfortable with your privacy being violated.

















  • I basically took the general idea from this Ubuntu doc and made som changes. After installing debootstrap, I followed these general steps:

    • set up an user for Steam, with adduser steam.
    • created a directory to host the “virtual machine” at /var/lib/chroot/steam64.
    • used the page linked above to create a schroot profile directory with the chroot data I want.
    • used the page linked above to create a schroot profile entry for the chroot, adding steam as one of its allowed users.
    • set up an Ubuntu 18.04 schroot with the following command: debootstrap --variant=buildd bionic /var/lib/chroot/steam64 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
    • on the host, allowed cross-“host” applications to lauch windows with xhost +local:.
    • once completed, entered the schroot as root and added the needed i386 arch and packages for Steam and for bubblewrap / Chrome containerization.
    • still in the schroot as root, installed enough packages for a basic graphical environment (basically: a text editor, xnest and xterm; between their dependencies, they’ll take care of most of everything).
    • exited the schroot.
    • entered the schroot as steam and fired up the Steam launcher manually.

    It’s not perfect, there are a few issues (in particular with audio) but once I had the installed schroot ready, I never had to worry about its 32-bit packages ever again. And that was back in… like, 2019 or something. Six months ago I copied to old schroot to my new machine and resumed playing, with no more cost than having to set up the schroot packages and the steam user (with the same old UID) on the new machine.

    Here’s a sample of the schroot profile file I’m using. The “steam64.local” is the profile directory, which is basically a copy of schroot/buildd (or of schroot/minbase) with some configurations in fstab and copyfiles to account for eg.: isolating /var/run and dbus, and giving the schroot access to the home directory for the steam user.