Sharing steam games between users on Linux

The last few days, we’ve been back to playing KSP (Kerbal space program). I got tired of entering my password for my son each time he wanted to play KSP - so looked into figuring out how he could play KSP from his own account. We’ll use sudo and fix a few pulseaudio shenanigans along the way.

First, let’s create a shell script in my account

~/.local/bin/ksp.sh

#! /bin/bash
cd /path/to/ksp && PULSE_SERVER=unix:/tmp/pulse-socket-$1 ./KSP.x86_64

Let others run the game command only

sudo visudo

# add this to your sudoers file
ALL = ALL(raghu) NOPASSWD: /home/raghu/.local/bin/ksp.sh

Add a script for each user to launch ksp
/home/user/.local/bin/ksp.sh
```
#!/bin/bash

xhost +
/home/raghu/.local/bin/ksp.sh $USER
```
At this point, game will launch, but we need to address the /tmp/pulse-socket-$1 bit above for getting sound.

First, as each user who will run the game, do the following:
start pulseaudio on unix socket
```
cp /etc/pulse/default.pa ~/.config/pulse/
vim ~/.config/pulse/default.pa
# insert this line somewhere
load-module module-native-protocol-unix auth-anonymous=1 socket=/tmp/pulse-socket-$USER
```

Sharing steam games between users on Linux

Raghu Rajagopalan's ramblings

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