Valve announced a few minutes ago that the Brewmaster branch of their Debian-based SteamOS Linux operating system received a major update, version 2.49, that was pushed to the Beta channel.

SteamOS Brewmaster update 2.49 Beta finally upgrades the kernel packages of the distribution to the long-term supported Linux 4.1 kernel, which is the latest LTS release supported for two years, until 2017.

As expected, the Linux kernel 4.1 LTS packages integrated into SteamOS 2.49 Beta were patched by Valve with extra drivers, in order to support the latest hardware components and make the OS reliable for gaming.

SteamOS 2.49 Beta also updates the video drivers for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards to the latest stable version available at the moment of writing this article, Nvidia Linux Graphics Driver 352.55 and AMD Catalyst 15.9, respectively.

While both the AMD and Nvidia video drivers received the corresponding DKMS packages and firmware for Linux kernel 4.1 LTS, the nvidia-support and glx-alternatives were updated to support the Nvidia driver.

What else is new in SteamOS 2.49 Beta

In addition to the changes mentioned above, SteamOS Brewmaster update 2.49 Beta brings the MySQL packages to version 5.5, and adds the firmware-nonfree package, which includes the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) and firmware for Linux kernel 4.1.

Additionally, several keyboards and mice that had been detected as joystick devices were blacklisted by adding the /etc/udev/rules.d/51-these-are-not-joysticks.rules rule file.

Last but not least, the tzdata package was updated to the latest upstream version, and modifies the steamos-base-files package to no longer opt for new installs into the Steam client Beta.

You can download SteamOS Brewmaster update 2.49 Beta right now from Softpedia, where it is distributed as a 64-bit ISO image. Please note that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.