Mumble on SteamOS with Gamepad Control Only)

[porkloin]

Note: Posting this here as a guide for anyone in the future trying to use third party voice chat on SteamOS.

My friends and I have all used Mumble for our voice chat for some time now. This is all well and good since we obviously are all PC gamers and Mumble has great Linux and OSX clients, etc. However, when I recently put together my SteamOS in-home streaming box, I was unable to hop in and out of mumble as I usually would on my main PC. so I set out to build a solution for using Mumble on SteamOS.

FYI, this obviously requires a keyboard and mouse, and also requires booting into the steamOS desktop.

**1. Set Up Mumble**

sudo apt-get install mumble

Make sure to launch mumble and connect to your server at least once, that way the program will save your authentication (if required).

**2. Connect/Disconnect Scripts**

We need two bash scripts that will help us to connect and disconnect. These will ultimately be added to Steam through the "Add a Non-Steam Game" feature, and you'll be able to trigger them through the big picture interface with a controller. The first script, which allows us to connect is called mumbleconnect. Do the following:

touch mumbleconnect
echo "mumble mumble:/server.com/?version=1.2.0" > mumbleconnect
sudo chmod +x mumbleconnect
sudo mv mumbleconnect /usr/local/bin

Likewise for our kill script:

touch mumblekill
echo "killall mumble"
sudo chmod +x mumblekill
sudo mv mumbleconnect /usr/local/bin

You can test the functionality of these scripts by simply typing their names in terminal ("mumbleconnect" or "mumblekill"). They should launch the GUI/connect to the root channel, and kill the program, respectively. Check out the mumble url documentation for further options, such as a connecting directly to a specific channel. http://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Mumble_URL

**3. Add scripts to Steam**
Launch Steam (non-big picture) and under the "Games" menu find "Add a Non-Steam Game to my Library". There, use the "browse" button to navigate to /usr/local/bin, and check our two user scripts, mumbleconnect and mumblekill. You should see them appear in your steam library.

**4. Auto minimize mumble when launched**

As it stands, we could boot back into SteamOS with big picture and launch mumble, but mumble would launch its GUI in front of SteamOS, which is a bit of a problem. Luckily, there's a program called devilspie that solves this issue.

sudo apt-get install devilspie
touch .config/devilspie/mumble.ds
echo "(if (is (window_class) "mumble") (begin (minimize) ) )" > .config/devilspie/mumble.ds

Test devilspie by launching devilspie (either from terminal or desktop GUI) and then launching mumble. The mumble window should immediately minimize.

If all is good, add a desktop entry for devilspie to the ~/.config/autostart folder so that it automatically starts with the system:

touch ~/.config/autostart/devilspie.desktop
echo -e '[Desktop Entry]\nName=Devilspie\nComment=This launches devilspie on start.\nExec=/usr/bin/devilspie\nTerminal=false\nType=Application' > ~/.config/autostart/devilspie.desktop


**5. Optional: Add push-to-talk to controller**

If you prefer not use to Mumble's signal-to-noise chat function and instead want to have push-to-talk, qjoypad is a program that allows for joypad buttons to emulate keystrokes.

sudo apt-get install qjoypad

Launch the program and use the GUI to configure a relatively unused button (I use "left" on the d-pad) to register the same a PTT button set manually in Mumble's "Shorcuts" setting. Test your PTT settings by launching mumble and verifying that the joypad button does, in fact, register as a PTT key. **NOTE:** some keys are not compatible with qjoypad, such as Pause. If you're having problems, try binding to another key.

Lastly, add a desktop entry so that qjoypad starts automatically.

touch ~/.config/autostart/qjoypad.desktop
echo -e '[Desktop Entry]\nName=qjoypad\nComment=This launches qjoypad on start.\nExec=/usr/bin/qjoypad\nTerminal=false\nType=Application' > ~/.config/autostart/qjoypad.desktop


And that should do it. Reboot into SteamOS with the big picture interface, and you should be able to "Play" the mumbleconnect script and chat with anyone on your mumble server, and "Play" mumblekill to disconnect when you're done.

Sorry for the long post, but hopefully somebody in the future who is looking to set this up will find it helpful. I know I looked high and low for a guide like this before I set my own solution up.