Failed to load steamui.so ?

Recent Steam update switched it to SDL2, so unless you have the very latest libSDL2 installed, you’ll get an error while trying to load Steam:

Fatal error: Failed to load steamui.so

The short test will quickly tell you the problem:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/Steam/ubuntu12_32 ld $HOME/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so

which will print a bunch of lines starting from:

ld: warning: libSDL2-2.0.so.0, needed by /home/tim/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamui.so, not found (try using -rpath or -rpath-link)

This means you need to install libSDL2 In case of openSuSE even the latest version (12.3 as of now) does not come with libSDL2. Fortunately it is quite easy to build it.

Make sure you have Mercurial and the development packages installed, and compile and install SDL2 by doing the following:

hg clone http://hg.libsdl.org/SDL SDL2
cd SDL2
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make
cp build/.libs/libSDL2-2.0.so.0.0.0 $HOME/Steam/ubuntu12_32/libSDL2-2.0.so.0

Now your Steam will work again.