Introduction

Gamers usually play games in the Windows OS, but what about playing games in other OS?, the io16 team managed to play Asseto Corsa from Steam in Debian 12 with just a few steps!

We experience some problems after attempting to run the game, the source of the problem was related to the graphic card drivers, in our case we used an Nvidia card, the symptoms were:

• The game crashes after a few seconds in the first loading screen.
• Attempt to play a race, but the race never starts.
• Attempt to play a race, but after the loading screen the game returns to the menu.
• Attempt to run the benchmark, but after the loading screen the game returns to the menu.

If you have an Nvidia graphic card check the section Nvidia drivers first. To check the graphic card used do the following steps: Make sure you have lspci installed. On a terminal run:

lspci --version

If the command fails you can install lspci by running:

sudo apt install pciutils

To check which GPU is being used run:

lspci -nn | egrep -i "3d|display|vga"

Nvidia drivers

First make sure you have the latest Nvidia drivers installed, you can check this in a terminal with the following command.

nvidia-smi

If command failed this means that you don't even have Nvidia drivers installed, check the section Update/install Nvidia drivers

Make sure you have the driver version 525.147.05 or above and CUDA version 12.0 or above.

If you have lower versions, you will need to do the steps below to update your Nvidia drivers.

Update/install Nvidia drivers

1. Open a terminal and run:

   sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
   

2. You have to add contrib non-free non-free-firmware after main and save the file, your file should look like this:

   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
   deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
   
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
   deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
   
   deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
   deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
   

   you can check more about here in the Official Debian SourcesList wiki

3. Now run:

   sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get upgrade
   

4. Restart your computer and check your Nvidia version with:

   nvidia-smi
   

Installing Proton

1. Install Proton 5.0 using Steam, you can do this in Steam > Asseto Corsa > Manage > Properties > Compatibility, check the option to force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool, a drop down will appear, in the dropdown choose Proton 5.0-10.
2. Download and Install Proton-GE 8.27 or greater, you can download it from Official proton-GE repository. Create the folder /.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d and extract the tar.gz in the folder
3. Close Steam, then launch it again.
4. Go to Steam > Asseto Corsa > Manage > Properties > Compatibility and now the version of Proton-GE that was installed in step 2 should appear, change the compatibility tool from Proton 5.0-10 to Proton-GE 8.27 (or the version of Proton-GE that was installed in step 2).
5. Launch the game, Proton-GE will install all the requirements needed, this will take some minutes, be patient the game should launch eventually.