SteamOS: Activate remote console login (ssh)

This is part of a series of posts where I put down what I did while playing around with SteamOS.

To be able to do some changes, it is convenient to have network access to the SteamMachine. Linux usually solves this via SSH. If you aren’t in a closed network behind a router, you might want to use better passwords than the username itself. And if you are in a secure network, it still doesn’t hurt. 🙂

Change to a local terminal via Ctrl+Alt+F1 (get back to the UI via Ctrl+Alt+F7.)
Login as user desktop. If you didn’t need to enter a password, set one by executing „passwd“ (it’ll ask you for your new password twice), because sudo won’t work otherwise.
Run the following command: „apt-get install openssh-server“
Now you should have the possibility to login to your server via SSH. If your router doesn’t resolves local names, you’ll need the IP address:
Run „ip addr show eth0|grep ‚inet ‚“ in the terminal, in this example your IP address would be 192.168.6.205:

steam@art:~$ ip addr show eth0|grep 'inet '<br /> inet 192.168.6.205/24 brd 192.168.6.255 scope global eth0

You can now use putty to get a remote terminal for your SteamMachine and WinSCP to copy files from and to the SteamMachine.