I recently received my pre-ordered Steam Controller, which I’ve be itching to use with my home-built HTPC/Steam Machine.  I do all my gaming (and everything else) on Ubuntu, and discovered at that the time the pre-releases were shipped, there was a bit of tweaking to do to get the controller working.  Thanks go to this Ask Ubuntu question and this Steam Community thread.  If you are using Ubuntu 15.10 or later, steps 1-3 shouldn’t be necessary, and hopefully a fix will be in place by the time the controllers are on general sale.

  1. Before you plug in your controller, edit (or create) file /lib/udev/rules.d/99-steam-controller-perms.rules.  This already existed on my system.  Edit to to contain at least these lines (it may also contain others): <pre>SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, ATTRS{idVendor}==”28de”, MODE=”0666”

KERNEL==”uinput”, MODE=”0660”, GROUP=”yourusernamehere”, OPTIONS+=”static_node=uinput” </pre>

Make sure you change &#8220;yourusernamehere&#8221; to the user you run steam as, or if there are several, the name of a group containing them all.  This will ensure that the controller is correctly recognised and can emulate a gamepad.</li> 

  * Run `sudo apt-get install python3-autopilot`.  This will install some packages which will add you to a group with write access to /dev/uinput.  This is necessary for the controller to work properly.
  * Reboot
  * Plug in your steam controller dongle.
  * Press the Steam button. It should beep and light up (if not, check the batteries are installed).
  * Launch Steam.  You should see a notification that your controller is detected.
  * Launch Big Picture Mode (if you don&#8217;t, Steam will tell you to).
  * Ensure the Steam overlay is enabled in Settings -> In-game.  If not, your controller configurations will simply not work.
  * Select a game, pick a controller configuration, and play!</ol>