A new official blog called Valve Linux has popped up, put together by an 11-strong team of developers on a mission to "strengthen the gaming scene on Linux, both for players and developers. This includes Linux ports of Steam and Valve games, as well as partner games. We are also investigating open source initiatives that could benefit the community and game developers."

The team was set up last year, and have been experimenting with porting Steam and Left 4 Dead 2 over to popular Linux operating system, Ubuntu. "We're just starting development and working with a single distribution is critical when you are experimenting, as we are. It reduces the variability of the testing space and makes early iteration easier and faster," say Valve.

That's just the beginning, however. "Based on the success of our efforts around Ubuntu, we will look at supporting other distributions in the future." They've got Left 4 Dead 2 running natively on Ubuntu, and a basic version of Steam. They're planning to polish both up over the course of the next few months and look into porting more games onto open source platforms.

"We'll be posting more information about those projects (and others) on a regular basis. Since this is a new effort for the team, we'd love to hear your opinions about the blog so shoot us an email. We also encourage you to leave comments and ideas for future postings. We want this to be a community of game developers, communicating with each other and talking about current efforts and future efforts in a powerfully creative environment."

You can take part and let your view be known over on the Valve Linux site .