So back in the first half of the year, as some of you may know, I built a Steambox, codenamed Project: One Wood.

Originally I’d planned to build something with a uITX formfactor or something equally small that could fit in a display unit.

That of course went out the window when I won a full ATX Motherboard at Respawn LAN  supplied by their wonderful sponsors over at Gigabyte.

Over the next couple of months I picked up components, where possible, from the various hardware sponsors, such as Corsair.
Then I stopped after finishing assembly at a LAN.

Since then I’ve been living with it hooked up to the TV, and honestly it’s got some real potential.

Sadly the number of gamepad capable games on linux is really disappointing, and I haven’t been able to stream games for use with the gamepad.
I practically turned it in to a Plex dedicated machine, which is amusing considering the grunt contained within the case.
The reason for that, well I use Plex on my main system, I use it on my nexus 7 and Galaxy SIII, and most recently on my brand new Asus t100. It quite simply does a better job than the PS3.
There’s also the fact I can control plex using any of those other devices.

I’ve done very little tinkering under the hood other than getting Plex running, as I want to see what Valve are going to do, and well I don’t want to break it.

Speaking of breaking, I managed to break Big Picture Mode a couple of times already, leading to it re-downloading Steam and reconfiguring it (the first was when I tested Sleep mode, and the most recent today was returning from the desktop).
Other than that and some initial kernel panicking after initial installation it’s been fairly solid.

So now, the steambox finally has a wireless keyboard/trackpad, I can finally play games from the comfort of a soft chair across the room.

Now I just need to wait for the steam controllers to be released and I should be set.

The future is looking good for games on linux, and a way to break out of the microsoft dominated PC gaming market.