As promised, Valve released the last Friday to any parties willing to install the beta software onto their own hardware for testing. This is the same software that is installed on the beta Steam Boxes that were sent to those lucky individuals selected for the first round of the public hardware testing. There are a large number of caveats with regards to the beta software which may prevent your ability to even run Steam OS on your own hardware. Most of it is covered in Valve’s that was posted as well. The basic hardware requirements right now are 64-bit x86 processor, 4GB memory, 500GB hard drive, NVIDIA Graphics, UEFI boot support and a USB port for the installation.

Sadly, I’m unable to test out the Steam OS currently as I don’t have a spare system with UEFI or a working NVIDIA graphics cards. It is also important to point out to people thinking about testing this out that the installer currently wipes out any data on the installed hard drive. This means that you can’t really install it on a secondary partition with a dual boot setup from the files that Valve provides. I’m sure that some individuals will find ways to hack different features into the OS as they do provide the source for it and it is a modified Debian Linux distribution.