I Turned My Steam Deck Into A POWERFUL Home Server

I recently bought a steam deck and love it when I'm using it but the majority of the time it's just sitting there sad what if there was a way to get more value out of your steam deck when not in use well that's exactly why I made this video where I'm going to show you how I set up my steam deck as an efficient but useful Home Server it can automate my home stream my collection of shows to my TV block spammy or even malicious ads run game servers post a website the list goes on so let's get started [Music] getting this all figured out wasn't necessarily easy but I finally landed on what I think was the best solution for running services on a steam deck if you don't really care to hear the whole process feel free to skip ahead as with all of my videos there should be time stamps or chapters to make it easy to do so so what I originally wanted to do with my steam deck was use the built-in Steam OS operating system to set up something like Docker using portaner to run things like home assistant jellyfin and whatnot and actually radial did a video of doing exactly that and it works great until you decide to update Steam OS in which case it would probably get completely overwritten and that's because steamos is what's called an immutable distro I think I'm pronouncing that right but basically that means the operating system or at least everything that's not in the home directory essentially is just an image that gets overwritten every time there's an update so anything you do in something like slash STC or slash user is going to get overwritten this means installing Docker is sort of out of the question if I wanted to have my server last ever every time there's an update to steamos now my main plan of what I was hoping to get working was to install distro box which is basically an easy way to run containerized distributions alongside whatever Linux distribution you're running so for example I could run Ubuntu in a container that has all of the Privileges and file access as Steam OS does but it's running in a container and so my thought was I'd suck at Arch Linux and I know Debian really well so I'll just set up a Debian container that I can run all of my server stuff in but I ran into lots of issues not having root access because things can't be installed not in the home directory yeah so that was all a pain so I eventually just settled to do something a bit easier that was still convenient and honestly just makes sense before I get into that though I should mention something else that's really easy and convenient which is getting a close shave thanks to the sponsor of today's video manscaped I've talked about manscaped in the past when they released their beard trimmer which I've been happily using for months now but they just keep cranking out awesome new products such as this the handyman it delivers a quick close shave with a unique dual blade system it features a standard foil shaver as well as a long hair leveler blade to knock down 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server mode you just turn it off plug in a dock or in my case just a dongle and then reboot into an external SSD that's running in my case Debbie and 12. then I installed Casa OS so that I could run containers like home assistant jellyfin Etc while the steam deck just sat there sipping power and another cool benefit of this setup is that there aren't any substantial changes to the Steam OS installed so if you want to try the same thing out what all do you need well obviously you need a steam deck but alongside that you either need to have a dock or in my case just a USBC dongle now ideally this will have at least three USB ports but as you notice in my case it only has two and the reason we need three is we need one for our operating system one for a keyboard or keyboard and mouse and then another to have our install media to actually install the operating system but I have an SD card reader so I actually just used an SD card and that worked fine you can also plug in another Hub to plug in like your mouse and keyboard to make that all work but yeah you need a USB hub or dock that has multiple USB ports you also need a drive to install the operating system on which in my case I just used this crucial one terabyte SSD with a little USB adapter but you can use an external drive or you can just buy a drive like this and then buy one of the mini available USB drive enclosures or adapters you'll also need a flash drive or in my case an SD card to use as the install media and lastly you'll want an ethernet cable and I guess an ethernet port on your adapter or dock because you will want to run this wired not over Wi-Fi you can run it over Wi-Fi but it's just going to be a much better experience if you connect this up to your router or a network switch or whatever your local network looks like okay so now that we have our monstrosity of the stuff plugged in let's actually head over to the desk and start setting this all up all right cool I'm over here at my desk and we're gonna start setting up this steam deck which I have set up right here it's kind of hard to see um but I have the USB hub plugged in and back here is my SSD and then I actually have another Hub plugged in for mouse and keyboard which is over here on my desk and then I have Network plugged in as well as HDMI which is why you don't see anything on screen because it's actually recording via screen capture into OBS but we have everything ready to go and yeah let's get started so first thing we we are in desktop mode here in the steam deck because we need to set up one thing which is clover and I'll have this link in the description but this is the steam deck Clover dual boot on GitHub and also really quick huge thanks to Ryan Rudolph for putting this all together and making this pretty easy and accessible but we can go down here to these instructions on how to install it which is fairly easy so we need to open up the console so I can hit the super key and type in console okay and then we're going to CD into our home directory which we already are and then we can copy paste this over to here and hit enter and then all we need to do now is CD into that directory it made and then we're going to add the permission here to run this as an executable and then all we have to do is actually run that now here if you haven't set up a sudo password it will have you set up a sudo password I already did so I'm just going to type mine in and then you'll get this prompt here and this isn't super helpful because we do have steamos installed but we're not installing Windows so I'm just going to hit Steam OS and then hit OK and that should be totally fine we should be good to go so we can exit out of all of this and then a shutdown okay so now we need to figure out how we're going to install Debian onto this external SSD and to do that I'm going to use something called vintoy and you can set up ventoy either on a flash drive or in my case an SD card just because I have an SD card reader on that USB hub and not an open USB port so all you have to do is go to the vintoy website which I'll have Linked In the description and then you can download this dot zip and then extract it now we also need our Debian ISO and I'll have a link for that in the description as well but essentially you can go to debian's website and then select the AMD 64 for Debian 12. now I already downloaded and extracted vintoy as well as the Debian ISO so in this folder here we can see we have my Debian 12.1 as well as this folder for ventoy 1.0.94 what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug in my SD card really quick and then I'm going to actually open up the ventoy folder we just made and run this ventoytodisc.exe and then here in this window I can select this generic storage device which is my SD card and hit install and I'm going to type yes because all my data is going to be lost on this which is fine okay cool and we have ventoy installed it popped up here and now all we have to do is just drag this Debian ISO into here and once that transfer is over we have ventoy installed and our Debian ISO ready to go sweet so it's done I'm going to eject it then now I'm going to plug this SD card into my USB hub and then we'll turn the steam back on okay cool so I have the SD card plugged into the USB hub now when I power on the steam deck I'm going to hold down the volume down button and hit the power button to get into the boot menu cool and then here I'm using my keyboard but you can actually use the d-pad and the a button to select your installer and you can see we actually have this Clover boot manager here which is what we installed earlier but we're going to go down to this USB device and you can hit enter or a and then I'm going to install Debian 12 and then normal mode now while this is booting up one thing you should note is if you do this without an external display it's probably going to be sideways on your steam deck which isn't great but it's totally fine you can just kind of tilt it like this and get through it but I'm using an external display with a capture card so that's why it's showing up like this and we're going to hit graphical install and I'm going to skip through some of these settings because some are just pretty obvious and dependent on where you live your time zone things like that so I'm going to skip a lot of those like English United States American English and so on okay in this menu we need to select our ethernet interface and this is a bit tricky so this is our wireless adapter that's on the steam deck itself and then these are two USB adapters because I actually have two USB hubs plugged in one of them is the one that I actually have a network connection plugged into and the other isn't you should only have one here hopefully uh but I'm gonna select one of these and see if it works and then if not we'll select the other ones I'm going to select the one that ends in F1 okay so I'm gonna hit continue that wasn't the right one and now I'm going to select the one that ends in one e and this should be the adapter that's plugged into my network and it looks like it is since it went much quicker that time cool so that was correct and now we have where we can type in a hostname I'm just going to type in Steam Dash Debian and then for the domain name it doesn't really matter I'm going to type in local now here's where you can set up your root password just make this something you're not going to forget I'm typing in a super secure password for this video now here you can type in your name I'm just going to put Haven and then make Haven my username and then I'm going to have a password for this user once again super secure password time zone now here we're going to select where we want to install Debian and I'm going to use the entire disk and then find the one terabyte drive which is this guy and then I'm just going to go ahead and put all files in one partition finish yes all right for package manager I'm just going to select my country and then the top one here we don't need a proxy so we can just hit enter and for popularity contest I'm just going to hit no okay so here's where things might get a bit controversial if you are familiar with Linux and self-hosting I'm actually well I'm going to get rid of gnome but I am going to select xfce now typically when you run a server you wouldn't run a desktop environment as well but I have some good reasons for that so just just trust me on this one and then I'm also going to install the SSH server just in case I want to connect to the server using SSH rather than having to plug a mouse and keyboard into it and this will take a little bit but once it's done we should have Debian installed okay so we're pretty much wrapped up with the install here I need to select yes for the system clock but everything should be done now installation complete and we can hit continue to reboot so I'm going to go ahead and do that I'm going to hit continue and I'm also once it gets to this next little screen here I'm going to unplug the SD card now when we boot into the steam deck will actually be met with okay I wasn't expecting a Rick and Morty background here but we're met with Clover so we can actually select which OS we want to boot into and once again you can actually do this with the d-pad on the steam deck but we're going to boot into Debian all right and here I'm going to go ahead and sign into the root user so root and then whatever the root password we set up was okay and this is a little bit wonky on the screen capture because my you can actually see on the steam deck down here is the main display I'm going to awkwardly go up to Applications settings display and get this sorted out here okay so I did a little bit of a display configuration now so you can see on the steam deck we do have a display right now but we also have on my capture card sort of our main display okay so the first thing we're going to do is go into the terminal emulator here and type in a few commands so we're going to first type in apt install curl and sudo just like that hit y for yes and then we're going to add our Haven user or whatever username you made to the sudo group so that we can use sudo when logged in as that user so to do that we can type in user mod then Dash little a Big G sudo which is the group and then the username of your user which for me is Haven then we can type in exit and I'm going to log out switch user and then log in as Haven hopefully I don't have to redo my displays here okay so I'm not really used to xfce and I don't know why in The Haven user I can't set up my display to have the bar and everything down here but we'll just keep rolling with it most likely you'll be doing this just on the steam deck display anyway so it shouldn't be that big of a deal but in the terminal we want to install what's called Casa OS which is a pretty cool application essentially your collection of applications that can help you run a simple Home Server and run different containerized applications if we go to their website you can see this get started page and it actually has a really simple command here to set up Casa OS and it's tested on Debian 11 and recommended then Debian 12 is very similar so it should run just fine so back in the steam deck we can type in curl Dash fs and then capital s capital l https colon slash get dot Casa OS dot IO and then we'll put this line here which is a pipe and then we'll type in sudo bash and we'll hit enter It'll ask for our sudo password or our user password and we can hit enter and this should run for a few minutes and then once it's done we should have Casa OS up and running and we can start doing some cool stuff all right cool so it looks like it's done and you can see up here it says we can go to http 192.168.10.168 and that's our local IP address for the steam deck but it may change because our network is probably using or your network is probably using DHCP which means this IP address could change I'm not going to dive way into it but if you can log into your router settings which is probably at 192.168.1.1 or 0.1 you can maybe set up DHCP to basically provide a static mapping for this so for me I use a thing called pfSense for my home router and in this page here I can actually find where it says steam Debian at 192.168.10.168 and I could hit this plus Mark here to make a static mapping and then the IP address for this device would never change which makes it easy to get to that server so once again I'm not going to dive way into this you can look up how to map a static DHCP mapping on your router or you can look into some other options like setting a static IP on Debian I'm not going to dive into that but you can hopefully figure that out on your own but for now this IP address should at least be the same for a little bit so over to my desktop I'm actually going to go to that 192.168.10.168 and hit enter and we should land at Casa OS how cool so I'm going to hit go and we can make a username and then a password that has to at least be eight digits and hit create and I'm going to hit cancel for now and now we're at the casa OS dashboard and from here we can do a few things like CR storage we can see we have one terabyte we could also see the other drives in the system like my SD card as well as my storage for my steam deck but the cool thing about Casa OS is that we can easily set up apps using this app store which is running a thing called Docker but don't worry about the back end that much so I'm going to go ahead and install home assistant and then also install jellyfin now I'm not going to go into a deep dive of Casa OS in this video but if you want to learn more you can watch this video here which I'll have Linked In the description where I do a deep dive into how to set up Casa OS and a few different applications and that might be more helpful but for now I'm just going to show some basics so now we have home assistant installed so I can just click on that and it may take a few minutes for this to get set up but once it is set up we should land at this page and I'm going to start setting up home system all right so it's going to be hard to see but I set up this studio backlight here and now I can actually change the color of it pretty easily see it's like pink now and I'm going to go back to a nice warm white again now I really want to do a deep dive into home assistant and I haven't done that yet but there are plenty of videos out there on the internet that you can check out on how to configure things like automations and scenes and all sorts of cool stuff like I said I want to make a video deep diving into that but I just haven't yet so my bad but home assistant is up and running and it's fairly easy to go in and start setting things up now next is jelly Fin and jellyfin lets you stream your own collection of movies and TV shows to TVs phones that sort of thing it's almost like your own private Netflix I'm not going to go into how to acquire those shows or movies I personally rip off things from Blu-rays and DVDs that we own and actually if you're interested in that there's another video that I'll link in the description but I'm going to just copy those files up to the server and show you how we can get started that way so if I go to jellyfin and I go to settings you can see there's a whole bunch of stuff here but down here we have in our container this media directory and we have that mapped from our server in this slash data slash media and if you're kind of confused what's going on there don't worry we can just go to files and then data and then media and here we already have these folders for movies music and TV shows so under TV shows I'm actually going to upload a folder now on my work Nas I have this for examples but I have the office us here I'm going to just drag that in and let it upload okay so that's uploaded and so I have this folder called the office us oops sorry and then within that I have season one I'm going to delete this DS store that's a Mac thing in season one we can see I have the six episodes that are in season one of the office now if I go back to our dashboard I can click on jellyfen and that's going to put me here where I can hit next set up a username and password and then here I need to set up a media library which is going to be our TV show Library so I can hit add Media Library and then under content type I'm going to hit shows and then we're going to map a folder so here I can go to that slash media folder and then TV shows and then hit OK then okay and then I'm going to hit next and next this gets a little bit into the weeds of jellyfin for now I would just leave this as default because that's fine because unless you set up how to connect to this from outside of your home network it's not really going to be a security issue or anything I would leave this UPnP thing unchecked unless you want to set that up and access jellyfin from outside your house and then we're done we can hit finish and sign back in and how cool we can see under shows we have the office us and if I click on this I can see season one and all of the episodes and I can hit play on diversity day probably my favorite episode of The Office ever and we can see we're streaming it now there's a lot more you can do with jellyfin like if I go to this admin dashboard I can go down to playback and then under Hardware acceleration I haven't actually tried this but you should be able to set up Hardware acceleration using this VA API and then select h.264 and hevc and then hit apply and what this is going to do is it's actually going to take advantage of the GPU that's on the steam deck and help transcode video so if you have a 4K video but you're watching on your phone and you want to watch it at 720p to save data it can in real time transcode that from a big 4K file down to something much smaller with a lower bit rate and yeah I haven't tried that yet so I'm going to see if that works we're going to go back to the office here and this does not need transcoding because it's a very low quality video but if I tried to just change it to a different bit rate that should force transcoding and we can see that it is transcoding and it looks like it's working if I go back to our dashboard we can see the CPUs barely doing anything which pretty much means that we're using Hardware acceleration to transcode rather than the CPU so pretty cool now there's a lot more you can do with Casa OS you can go into the App Store and install things like pie hole for example to block ads they actually just recently added this mine OS which you can use to run Minecraft servers you can use emulator JS to have your own emulators of like NES and SNES games in your web browser there's a whole lot you can do here and then you can also do custom installs to install containers from outside the App Store so there's a lot you can do with Casa OS and I have more info in that video like I mentioned so definitely go check that out all right so we have Casa OS up and running we have home assistant and jellyfin no issues so what happens if we turn this off well I'm just going to hit the power button really quick shut down and we're going to sort of simulate what would happen if we were to be playing on our steam deck and then decide to turn it down and just plug it in and turn it on okay well unfortunately this booted into Steam OS which is a little bit unfortunate so we're going to turn it off and now we're going to boot back up into it using the boot manager like we did earlier I had this happen with me when I first did the installs so hopefully we should be able to get it fixed so I'm going to hold down the volume down button and turn it back on again and then select the Clover bootloader once again all right so back in the Clover bootloader we should be able to see these two options and I'm going to go back into Debbie and Linux one again once again and here's a big issue we just booted into defian but it prompts us with the login so Casa OS isn't going to start running if I try to pull it up over here you can maybe see it oh it is running okay I thought this wasn't going to work because our user wasn't signed in but it is working because I guess it's running as a service that's not tied to the desktop environment or something like that I'm not a Linux desktop guy so I don't entirely know this but I still want the brightness to be fixed on the screen which is another issue I was going to tackle so to do that I think I'll need this to automatically log into our Haven user so what I'm going to do is go ahead and log in really quick so I'm going to open up the console here and then I'm going to type in sudo Dash e slash Etc light DM slash light DM dot comp and hit enter sudo password or user password I should say and then we're going to scroll all the way down until we get past this seat colon asterisk and there's a few things we're going to want to change where it says Auto login user we're going to get rid of this pound sign is that the word and then we're going to type in our username and then this Auto login timeout we're going to make sure is uncommented and set to zero and that's basically just going to immediately log us into behaven user so let's test that out really quick oh to finish this we need to control hit control X and then Y and enter and now we can say sudo reboot hit enter and hopefully this time it'll automatically pull us into the Clover bootloader I'm curious yeah Okay cool so this time it took us to Clover and we'll once again select Debian Linux hit enter and perfect it brought us straight into the desktop no prompt to log in because I want to go down here can't really see probably but I'm going to go to settings power manager I'll drag it up to the screen capture over here and then under display power management here I want to say put to sleep after one minute and switch off after one minute as well we'll just try that and then plugged in as well we'll do the same thing we'll say switch off after one minute and then we'll hit close and let's see what happens here we're going to wait one minute and just see what it does in the meantime we can see that Casa OS is still running just fine we can go to home assistant perfect the display is off we can see there's no video here on the screen cap we can still get to everything in our server just fine pretty cool now really quick I'm going to boot back into Steam OS instead of Debian because here we should be able to make one more important little tweak all right cool so we're back in desktop mode and there actually is this cool little Clover toolbox icon here and I'm going to say execute type in my password and then right here we can click boot okay and this is that same menu as we looked at earlier to decide the default OS but now we have this option to click last OS and so this will be helpful because we can hit OK and now whatever our last operating system was is what clover will boot into by default which if our server was running last and for some reason the system crashes when it reboots it'll just boot back into Debian for our server but if we start the steam deck without the USB hub plugged in we won't have that drive to boot into so clover will just boot into Steam OS like normal so pretty cool so let's test that out really quick all right so in Clover I'm going to boot into Debian really quick all right so we've booted into Debian and then now in the web browser I'm going to refresh Casa OS and it's up and running like we would expect I'm going to restart it really quick and just make sure that it boots back into Debian all right so steam deck is restarting and it looks like Debian Linux is going to automatic boot in 10 seconds by the way I think you can adjust the timeout in those Clover settings in the steamos desktop thing as well all right so we Auto booted into Debian and this should also Auto boot by the way I've skipped it every other time but yeah cool so we're in Debian like we expected and if we reload cos OS it's working now what happens if we shut this down and unplug it from the dock well let's find out all right so steam deck is off I'm just going to unplug it really quick so no screen cap anymore I'm going to turn it on really quick and it boots into clover which there is no other option here besides Steam OS for steam deck so for some reason it's not gonna Auto boot I guess so we can probably just hit a so not that big of a deal right and we'll give it just a minute all right it looks like we booted into Steam OS pretty cool no problems there now a couple things you might be curious about how much power does it draw for example I have a kilowatt meter that has been plugged into and I've ran this actually for well I reinstalled it all for this video obviously but I ran this exact same setup for about two or three days and I noticed it only pulled around 8 watts while I was sitting at idle running home assistant it also ran totally fine for about two and a half days I even monitored it using uptime Kuma I didn't have any times where it was down it just sat here doing its steam deck server thing I guess I don't know where I'm going with this but yeah pretty cool it's cool you can have this going around gaming doing your thing but then when you're not gaming on it you can still get some more value by having it run some Home Server stuff or if you've used one of these and then decide you'd never really want to use it again but you don't want to sell it yeah that's cool it may be kind of silly it may be gimmicky and realistically it might be better to just buy a different device to use as a full-time Home Server especially if you have a family that might want to use those surfaces when you're out commuting and playing on your steam deck but still I think it's cool I think it was fun to dive in to and I learned quite a bit about Steam OS and the steam deck and some Linux stuff so hopefully you guys enjoyed this if not let me know with one of those guys but if you did give me one of those guys um yeah if you want to learn more about Casa OS you can check out this video here which I'll like I said I'll have Linked In the description along with a few others that's about it so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I hope to see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 35,625

Keywords: CasaOS, Debian, Home Assistant, Jellyfin, Linux, Steam Deck, SteamOS, automation, clover, desktop mode, docker on steam deck, home server, how to run home assistant on steam deck, immutable distro, jellyfin on steam deck, linux tutorial, low power consumption., plex on steam deck, portainter steam deck, steam deck home server, steam deck review, steamdeck, streaming, tutorial, valve steam deck, website hosting

Id: 6Aey0YFYjbQ

Length: 32min 6sec (1926 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 25 2023