When Valve announced that they were creating the Steam OS operating system both for PC and the upcoming Steam Machines, many fans were intrigued at what the operating system would be like. Now, the company has released new details about Steam OS, including what sort of hardware requirements the operating system will require.

Valve announced through a FAQ what the name of the first version of Steam OS will be, and what the operating system is based on:

"SteamOS is a fork (derivative) of Debian GNU/Linux. The first version (SteamOS 1.0) is called 'alchemist' and it is based on the Debian 'wheezy' (stable 7.1) distribution."

If users want to run Steam OS they will need a PC that has a Intel or AMD 64-bit capable processor and 4GB of RAM memory. When the operating system is launched it will only have support for NVIDIA graphics cards, but AMD and Intel graphics support will be coming soon. Steam OS will require 500GB of internal memory and UEFI boot support. Finally, a user will need a USB port for installing Steam OS.

Valve also clarified what software will be able to run of Steam OS if users decide to download the operating system:

"SteamOS is designed to run Steam and Steam games. It also provides a desktop mode which can run regular Linux applications. SteamOS makes use of the standard APT package manager for software updates; you can add third-party sources to your subscribed repositories to gain access to more applications. SteamOS currently provides a limited set of packages, but many Debian wheezy packages work fine on SteamOS. We plan to make a wider variety of packages available directly from the SteamOS repositories over time."

The company also gave users an idea of how often Steam OS will be updated in the future:

"We will push out security fixes and critical bugfixes as soon as we are comfortable shipping them. The beta update channel will receive regular fixes and improvements on a daily or weekly basis and every few months we will roll up these updates into the released channel. We are just starting to evaluate what the best process is and the release cadence might vary in the future."

With Valve focused on working on Steam OS, users will have to watch for third party companies for information about the upcoming Steam Machines. Valve will not make their own Steam Machine, but is instead allowing others to create their own versions of the console and put Steam OS on the devices.