I love my steamlinks to death, and use them as thin clients around the house (e.g. run my 3d printer/laser cutter in the garage). Fiddling with the steamlink, I noticed that vhusbdarm version is v4.5.6 from April 2023 while the current version was released May 2025. So I'm just curious if it'll get further updates, or if it's possible to sideload the current binary onto the steamlink via SSH.
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Most people seem to use steamlink on a pi4 or 5 now because they are faster and they pi has very good software support (i.e regular kernel updates)
I sent valve a build of virtualhere about 6months ago so it should have been updated on the steamlink image but im not sure as i dont keep track of it.
Pick up a cheap pi4 (or ideally 5) and it will be better. The steamlink hardware is difficult to find now because its been out of production for several years.
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I'll probably do that some where down the line; at present my steam links work so it doesn't really feel necessary to spend money to replace them. I did figure out that I can actually sideload newer versions of virtualhere to the steam link. The binary that ships from steam lives in a writeable directory at /home/steamlink/bin/vhusbdarmsl, so replacing/updating it manually is trivial.
Apparently the steam license isn't compatible with the generic build, but that might be cause the generic build tries to look at /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1/product which doesn't exist on the steamlink:
Mon Jun 2 14:36:05 2025 LOG_INFO >>> Starting VirtualHere USB Server v4.7.8 (Built: May 12 2025, 11:49:21)<<<Mon Jun 2 14:36:05 2025 LOG_INFO Using configuration /var/lib/vhusbdarm/generic.iniMon Jun 2 14:36:05 2025 LOG_ERR Invalid LicenseMon Jun 2 14:36:05 2025 LOG_INFO Server licensed to=unlicensed max_devices=1Mon Jun 2 14:36:05 2025 LOG_INFO Listening on all network interfaces at TCP port 7575Mon Jun 2 14:36:05 2025 LOG_DEBUG Warning, could not open device product file /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1/product, error 2 (No such file or directory)Rewriting the ini file to remove the License param lets it work like a trial instance, which works for my limited use cases.
Any chance you could add the cpu optimized builds of
vhusbdarmslto the Linux USB Server | VirtualHere page for us dinosaurs that still use the old hardware?.
I dont mean to throw out the steamlink and buy a pi :) that is a waste, wait until they break. Here is a link to the latest build (that server is always updated every time there is a new virtualhere server build)
https://www.virtualhere.com/sites/default/files/usbserver/vhusbdarmsl
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Yeah, these little machines are fantastic for what they are and I hope to keep them running for a good while more. I'll poke Slouken on the steamlink feedback forum about updating the binary in the official release; the new normal seems to be a flurry of updates near the end of the year, so it'll probably be 3-5 months before the current round of feedback makes its way to a new beta/stable update. Thank you for continuing to support the steamlink! I've been playing with the updated binary for a day and the latency//stability seems to be a night and day improvement - and it happily takes my current license, so it is truly a perfect drop-in replacement via ssh!