
The new RK3588/RK3588S boards have much more power than we’ve typically had available to us in the past on ARM boards. With a whopping 8 CPU cores and a Mali 610 GPU the Orange Pi 5 is capable of running Steam using Box64/Box86. It’s even able to play basic games pretty well (with some tinkering usually).
In this guide I’ll show you how to set up Steam on the Orange Pi 5 and run Stardew Valley on it. You should keep your expectations in line though because there is no native ARM client for Steam. We are using emulation and instruction translation. You will also likely be missing libraries for most games you try which will require some fiddling.
This guide is only for Armbian running the Ubuntu Jammy variant with the Gnome desktop installed only (platinum support status). The Orange Pi official distributions will not have 3D support and I don’t care about whatever other flavor of Linux you are running either. I’m not going to install your preferred flavor of Linux and try to figure out how to do this on there nor am I interested in troubleshooting it. Please don’t ask.
With all of that being said let’s get started!
Hardware Used

The Orange Pi 5 the latest release from Orange Pi and is the most powerful model yet. It has a 6 core CPU and options from 4GB of RAM all the way up to 32GB of RAM!
Links: Amazon.com*, AliExpress*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*

The Kioxia (Toshiba) 128GB M.2 2230 PCIe NVMe drive is much shorter than most NVMe drives (full size is 2280). It fits great with single board computers / tablets / other smaller form factors.
Links: Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.com.au*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*, Amazon.nl*, Amazon.pl*, Amazon.se*, Amazon.sg*

The Geekworm copper heat sink set is designed to fit many different single board computers. It uses thermal conductive adhesive which many “cheap” heat sink kits for SBCs don’t have. Eliminates hot spots and reduces throttling. Can be further enhanced by powered cooling over the heat sinks.
Links: Amazon.com*, Amazon.ca*, Amazon.co.jp*, Amazon.co.uk*, Amazon.de*, Amazon.es*, Amazon.fr*, Amazon.it*

The Orange Pi official mouse uses 2.4GHz wireless to give you a wireless mouse experience with the Orange Pi
Links: Amazon.com*, AliExpress*

The Orange Pi monitor is meant to be a portable monitor you can take anywhere. It has a resolution of 1080P and features a hinge in the back that folds out to support the monitor.
Links: Amazon.com*, AliExpress*
Installing Dependencies
First we need to install some dependencies that are required by Steam. Use the following lines:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf sudo apt update && sudo apt install build-essential git cmake gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf libc6-dev-armhf-cross libappindicator1 libnm0 libtcmalloc-minimal4 binfmt-support liblttng-ust-dev libcairo2:armhf libgmp10:armhf libvulkan1:armhf libudev-dev:armhf -y
Next we’re going to install Box64. Paste the following lines in your terminal:
git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64 cd box64 mkdir build; cd build; cmake .. -DRK3588=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo make -j4 sudo make install
We also need Box86:
cd ~ git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 cd box86 mkdir build; cd build; cmake .. -DRK3588=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo make -j4 sudo make install
We also need to install the 3D support drivers with the following:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:liujianfeng1994/panfork-mesa sudo add-apt-repository ppa:liujianfeng1994/rockchip-multimedia sudo apt update sudo apt dist-upgrade -y sudo apt install mali-g610-firmware rockchip-multimedia-config -y
That’s it for the dependencies! Before you continue you should reboot the device with:
sudo reboot
Installing Steam
First we need to configure the environment for Steam. Use the following lines to add two environment variables to your Linux environment:
echo 'export STEAMOS=1 export STEAM_RUNTIME=1 export DOTNET_SYSTEM_GLOBALIZATION_INVARIANT=1 export PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gofaster,gl3' | sudo tee /etc/profile.d/steam.sh source /etc/profile.d/steam.sh
Next we’re going to use Box86’s install_steam.sh script like this:
cd ~/box86 ./install_steam.sh
Installation is now finished!
Launching Steam
I highly recommend running Steam from a terminal/console like this so you can see the error messages (especially when launching new games):

It’s not unexpected for it to crash right after you log in for the first time. Mine crashed after I entered my one-time e-mail code from Steam. Simply launch it again. I had to log in again but it remembered the PC and stuck the second time.
It also crashed once when I installed Stardew Valley. I then just launched Steam again and it downloaded the game and launched perfectly afterward:

Conclusion
This is only the beginning of your journey. I can get you this far. You should expect most games you try to launch to crash with missing libraries. You then typically will install those libraries through apt (or other means) to fix it. In fact Stardew Valley wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t added several dependencies to the dependency section. It did crash at first when I tried this and it took several hours for me to figure out the right dependencies to install for it.
If you are encountering really strange errors launching other titles you will want to use the trick I shared earlier of launching Steam within your console. You can then report such issues to the developers here on the GitHub issues page for Box64. There is a *ton* of helpful information there (and people) that can help with getting stubborn titles to launch. The developer ptitSeb is an absolute legend as well.
My performance was very, very good on Stardew Valley. It takes a while to load the game for some reason but it runs perfectly smoothly on the Orange Pi 5. Obviously this is not an incredibly demanding game on your GPU and I would recommend sticking to those.
I would absolutely also recommend active cooling on your Orange Pi 5. You at a bare minimum need my recommended heat sinks but even with my heat sinks I managed to overheat my Orange Pi 5 (forcing a power cycle) several times writing this article. If I was going to be gaming a lot more regularly on this device I would put a powered fan on it. The few times my system locked up I touched my heat sink and they were *very hot*. If you are getting lock-ups touch your heat sink (carefully) and see if it’s absolutely burning up. That means you need a powered fan.
Overall I’m pretty impressed. You’re going to have technical problems with various titles but this absolutely works. You can run games that aren’t super demanding at full speed and enjoy them on a 64-bit ARM board / distribution. Great work to all of the projects involved that have led to this being a reality!
Other Resources
Make sure to check out my Orange Pi 5 review here
I’ve also covered setting up a SSD on the Orange Pi 5 here
The Orange Pi 5 also makes a great host environment for Home Assistant which I’ve covered here
Getting this at step 3:
E: Unable to locate package mali-g610-firmware
E: Unable to locate package rockchip-multimedia-config
Steam will still install but it will crash every time
It probably means you’re using the wrong operating system. From the Armbian download page for Orange Pi 5:
Enable 3D Acceleration (Ubuntu Gnome variant only):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:liujianfeng1994/panfork-mesa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:liujianfeng1994/rockchip-multimedia
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt install mali-g610-firmware rockchip-multimedia-config
This notice is still there unchanged. Notice that it says “Ubuntu Gnome variant only”. Are you running the Ubuntu Gnome variant? I did specify in the article that you need to use *exactly* what I am if you expecting to just type the commands in and have it work.
Hopefully that helps!
Hello James,
Trying to install Steam on an Orange PI 5 Plus running Ubuntu 22.04 using your guide. In the steps around installing box 64 and box 86 you reference the cmake command. mkdir build; cd build; cmake .. -DRK3588=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j4
sudo make install If I attempt to run that command under sudo it errors out. bash: cmake: command not found
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.
make: *** No rule to make target ‘install’. Stop.
Please advise what I’m missing. Thank you for this guide.
Hey Michael,
It looks like cmake isn’t making it on there still. Try:
sudo apt install build-essential
or:
sudo apt install build-essential
We’ll definitely need that to build it. Hopefully that helps!
Hello. I have a problem launching steam. After installation, Steam hangs at the stage of logging into the account and the line “Nothing to do” appears in the terminal and nothing happens. How to fix it? armbian_23.5.1 with gnome
Hey Andrew,
The best way is to launch Steam with the console and then google the error messages you’re getting before it closes. Usually it will be some small dependency you can install through apt or there will be a flag you can use. Everyone’s situation will be slightly different depending on how the system is configured but that’s generally the best way.
Feel free to share what you find here in the comments as well as I try to add more and more fixes to the article as people share them to help others getting started.
Hopefully that helps!
this is what it says to me in the terminal
Error initializing native libgnutls.so.30 (last dlerror is libgnutls.so.30: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64)
Error: Symbol __gmpz_scan1 not found, cannot apply R_386_JMP_SLOT 0xe7d8e010 (0x48b6) in /home/andrew/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libhogweed.so.4
Error: Symbol __gmpz_init_set not found, cannot apply R_386_JMP_SLOT 0xe7d8e01c (0x48e6) in /home/andrew/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libhogweed.so.4
Error: Symbol __gmpz_tdiv_qr not found, cannot apply R_386_JMP_SLOT 0xe7d8e024 (0x4906) in /home/andrew/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libhogweed.so.4
Error: Symbol __gmpn_copyd not found, cannot apply R_386_JMP_SLOT 0xe7d8e028 (0x4916) in /home/andrew/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libhogweed.so.4
and
[2023-08-04 10:13:44] Background update loop checking for update. . .
[2023-08-04 10:13:44] Checking for available updates...
[2023-08-04 10:13:44] Downloading manifest: https://client-update.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam_client_ubuntu12?t=3270175543
[2023-08-04 10:13:44] Manifest download: send request
[2023-08-04 10:13:44] Manifest download: waiting for download to finish
[2023-08-04 10:13:45] Manifest download: finished
[2023-08-04 10:13:45] Download skipped by HTTP 304 Not Modified
[2023-08-04 10:13:45] Nothing to do
This is where it all ends
Hey Andrew,
So as per my previous post I googled your error. I found a Box86 post here:
You may need to use sudo apt install libnm0 libappindicator1 to run steam.
Followed by:
Thanks, that worked!!
This is what you are going to have to do. I cannot help you. My system doesn’t do this. You need to look up your errors and figure out which libraries you are missing and install them. If you are not comfortable with that process then you should not attempt this and that goes the same for anyone else reading this. It’s hard to do this and you have to be willing to do some research and some googling. If that’s off the table then so is running this on ARM.
Hopefully that helps!
Hey James!
Thank you kindly for such a great guide! I am a total newbie, have zero experience in everything related to ARM (..and Linux). I stumbled across this article after a week of trying to fix errors by myself.
Also, tried Steam’s Proton, successfully launched and played Fallout: New Vegas (ran way better than I expected). Maybe that kind of info could be useful for newbies like me: games that natively use DirectX 9 could be launched by adding “PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%” as launch arguments via game’s properties.
Take care,
Nick
Hey Nick,
Thanks so much for the kind words and sharing this flag, I’m sure that will help others get some titles going. Enjoy and take care!