#1025970 steam: SteamVR cannot find "getcap" to finish its installation

Package:
steam
Source:
steam
Submitter:
Julian Groß
Date:
2026-06-16 17:35:03 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1025970#5
Date:
2022-12-12 18:13:38 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

when installing SteamVR inside Steam, it requires the getcap command which it apparently cannot find.
getcap is at /usr/sbin/getcap on my system which is not in my users PATH. I assume this is the actual issue.

I have actually successfully been using SteamVR without this.
It will just throw an error on every start that the installation couldn't be finished and tell you to look at /tmp/SteamVRLauncherSetup.log which in turn has a single line:
`Mon Dec 12 18:52:46 CET 2022 - Error: getcap is required to complete the SteamVR setup.`

Greetings
Julian Groß
#1025970#10
Date:
2022-12-12 19:43:20 UTC
From:
To:
Debian does not control where proprietary Steam or SteamVR code looks for
executables, so please report this to
<https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/>.

(Technically we could set PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/sbin in the Debian-specific
wrapper script, but that doesn't seem like necessarily a great idea since
this affects all parts of Steam and all games, and there's a lot in
/usr/sbin other than getcap.)

Thanks,
    smcv
#1025970#15
Date:
2023-06-20 20:38:29 UTC
From:
To:
For reference, someone reported the bug upstream:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/issues/563

Though with Valves track record when it comes to SteamVR support, they
will likely never fix it.