It’s been more than two years since the last time I posted set-up instructions for Vrui and HTC Vive, and a lot has changed in the meantime. While Vrui-5.0 and its major changes are still not out of the kitchen, the current release of Vrui, Vrui-4.6-005, is stable and works very well with the Vive. The recent demise of our CAVE, and our move towards VR headsets until we figure out how to fix it, have caused a lot of progress in Vrui’s set-up and user experience. The rest of this article contains detailed installation and set-up instructions, starting from where my previous step-by-step guide, “An Illustrated Guide to Connecting an HTC Vive VR Headset to Linux Mint 19 (“Tara”),” left off.
If you did not follow that guide and its prerequisite, “An Illustrated Guide to Installing Linux Mint 19 (“Tara”),” this one assumes that you already have:
- a “gaming” or “VR ready” PC with a powerful Nvidia GeForce graphics card,
- a full installation of a 64-bit Ubuntu-based Linux operating system, e.g., Ubuntu or Linux Mint, with the MATE desktop environment,
- proprietary drivers for the Nvidia graphics card installed and working,
- head-mounted display filtering disabled in the graphics card driver,
- and a working installation of SteamVR.
If you use a Linux distribution that is not Ubuntu-based, such as my own favorite, Fedora, or another desktop environment such as Gnome Shell or Cinnamon, you will have to make some adjustments throughout the rest of this guide.
This guide also assumes that you have already set up your Vive virtual reality system, including its tracking base stations, and that your Vive headset is connected to your PC via HDMI and USB (I will publish a detailed illustrated guide on that part soon-ish). Continue reading