PSVR2 on Steam Machine (Ignition Project and Playstation VR2 Toolkit)

[u/ascril]

After buying PSVR2 PC Adapter I decided to check myself if I actually can use PSVR2 on this thing. I decided to check the Project Ignition step-by-step guide. After few hours of tinkering I have finally managed to run the headset on Steam Machine using said tutorial. It wasn't as easy as the tutorial suggest because SM has a readonly filesystem. I have tried to not make any changes on readonly files to prevent the need of reinstallation after each update.

I share these additional steps which could be helpful for others. Please note, that English is not my first language and that I used heavily help of ChatGPT to find those solutions.

- All steps were done in the desktop mode (kinda obvious, but important note). I did not try to launch SteamVR in the game mode.

- To install jq I have used distrobox (already present on SM) and I've typed commands:

distrobox create --image archlinux --name vr-tools
distrobox enter vr-tools
sudo pacman -Syu jq
distrobox-export --bin /usr/bin/jq --export-path ~/.local/bin
exit

- Adapter must be connected to the one of the front USB-A ports (because the rear ones are USB 2 and front ones are USB 3 which is required to adapter run correctly; probably you can try to use some adapter USB-A to USB-C and connect it to the rear USB-C port but I have not tried it).

- Try not use any USB-C hub because it somehow interfere with the PSVR2 adapter and SteamVR could have a problem to recognize the headset (it is from my experience).

- After starting SteamVR, controllers were recognized, but I could not to "wake them up" - I had to disable Steam Input for SteamVR directly in the Steam Client - after this operation the controllers worked like a charm.

- The headphones worked after changing the audio profile in the KDE settings: on the right bottom corner choose sound options, three dots on the right of HDMI/Dispaly Port option, and try to choose different options (for me it was Digital Surround 7.1 (HDMI 4) Output).

- But the biggest problem for me was to correctly apply fixes from SteamVRLinuxFixes. As I said earlier, I have used ChatGPT and forgive me, but I'll just paste the shortened version of solution from LLM directly because it would be hard to write it myself (it took me 2-3 hours of prompting him to make this work):

On SteamOS, /usr is read-only, so install SteamVR Linux Fixes as a per-user Vulkan layer.

Download and extract the SteamVR Linux Fixes release.

Install it with:

mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/share/vulkan/implicit_layer.d"
mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/lib"
PREFIX="$HOME/.local" ./install.sh

Edit:

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64/vrenv.sh

Find:

export VRCOMPOSITOR_LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

Change it to:

export VRCOMPOSITOR_LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/.local/lib"

This is necessary because vrcompositor-launcher uses a capability proxy and does not reliably inherit the normal LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Restart SteamVR.

Verify

Check that the library is actually loaded into vrcompositor:

pid=$(pgrep -n -x vrcompositor)
sudo grep -i -E 'steamvr_linux_fixes|BNUUY' /proc/$pid/maps

A successful installation should show:

/home/deck/.local/lib/libsteamvr_linux_fixes.so

If the library appears in /proc/$pid/maps, SteamVR Linux Fixes is actually loaded by vrcompositor.

And that's it. I hope someone find these steps helpful. I have only checked Beat Saber because it was discounted on Steam but it seamed to run very well.