Step by step guide to setting up HTC Vive on Ubuntu

Ankur Handa and Clemens Eppner

Get the latest versin of Steam from Steam Store

Make sure you have an up-to-date NVIDIA driver (on 20th Feb 2020, we had NVIDIA driver version 430.64 installed on our Ubuntu 16.04). We installed the driver via NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-430.64.run file we obtained from the NVIDIA website. You will need to make sure it also installs 32-bit GL libraries, so click on Yes when it prompts during the installation process.

If you do not install 32-bit GL libraries, you may get the following error

You are missing the following 32-bit libraries, and Steam may not run:libGL.so.1

For further requirements please check https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux

Search for SteamVR in the steam application, you should see the following image:

Click on Launch to install it. Make sure you have SteamVR beta (and not linux_temp) version installed otherwise the SteamVR apps and OpenVR will not work. Now, to ensure that you install SteamVR beta, right click on the SteamVR app and click on properties.

You will see another window pop up and now click on BETAS and you can select beta from the options presented in the menu

Most of the process mentioned below is from this blog

$ git clone https://github.com/ChristophHaag/openvr.git
$ cd openvr
$ mkdir build
$ cd !$
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../
$ make

Now plug in the vive and set up the permissions as below:

$ sudo chmod a+rw /dev/hidraw*

Create a shell file to set up the variables necessary for running openvr via steamvr. On our computer the file, called run_openvr.sh looks like this:

export openvr=~/workspace/codeopenvr
export steam=~/.steam
export steamvr=$steam/steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:\
/usr/lib/:\
/usr/lib32/:\
$openvr/lib/linux32/:\
$openvr/lib/linux64/:\
$steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/lib/i386-linux-gnu/:\
$steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/amd64/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/:\
$steamvr/bin/linux32/:\
$steamvr/bin/linux64/:\
$steamvr/drivers/lighthouse/bin/linux32/:\
$steamvr/drivers/lighthouse/bin/linux64/

We also need to set up the following permissions

$ sudo vim /etc/udev/rules.d/83-hmd.rules
$ echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"' >> test.txt 
$ echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="28de", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"' >> test.txt
$ sudo cp test.txt /etc/udev/rules.d/83-hmd.rules
$ sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

The file /etc/udev/rules.d/83-hmd.rules may not exist, so it needs to be created first.

source the run_openvr.sh file

source run_openvr.sh

Now run the Steam server via

$steamvr/bin/linux64/vrserver --keepalive

In another window, run this hellovr_opengl example

~/.steam/steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/run.sh ~/workspace/code/openvr/samples/bin/linux64/hellovr_opengl

You should see the following images streamed in your Vive when you wear it

To run this example, you have to enable the camera via SteamVR as shown in the gif below:

Once the camera is enabled, you should be able to play the tracking camera example via

~/.steam/steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/run.sh ~/workspace/code/openvr/samples/bin/linux64/tracked_camera_openvr_sample

and see the following images

If you'd like to play these examples in python then we recommend to install this (unofficial) version of pyopenvr.

This requires Python 3.5+ and many other dependencies including pillow, pyopengl, glfw etc.

In addition, it is important to change c_void_p in this line in the pyopenvr code to c_uint32 otherwise any python example will crash with a message that might look like this:

  self.texture.handle = self.resolve_texture_id
TypeError: cannot be converted to pointer

This is also mentioned in this particular issue in the pyopenvr repository.

Install pyopenvr via

python setup.py install 

Make sure that the PYTHONPATH variable is set up correctly:

export PYTHONPATH=~/workspace/code/pyopenvr/src:$PYTHONPATH

Now you should be able run the samples in python via

~/.steam/steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/run.sh python src/samples/glfw/hellovr_glfw.py

and see the following image