SteamOS

[Huw the Poo]

Wow, really?  Ubuntu's the officially supported distro so you should have no problems at all.  Did you download from the Steam website or via the repo?  Jockey is a now-deprecated program that some distros used to use to make installing hardware drivers easier (which it utterly failed to do in the majority of cases).  Nobody has used it in a while, as far as I know.

I'll do some research for you.

Edit: According to the Ubuntu website you just need to install it from the software centre.  Is that what you did?  And that you should only install Valve's version if the Ubuntu version didn't install cleanly.

Oh, another possibility is that it doesn't use Jockey any more, but because it's still a dependency in the package, it will complain if it can't find it.  So have you gone into the software sources and enabled things like third-party/community sources?  It's been a long time since I last used Ubuntu but it used to only have a small subset of official software sources enabled by default.

[republic]

I eventually got Steam to work through apt-get'ing and updating the package manager.   However, I then tried to get my screen brightness controls to work and editing a config file was recommended...so  I did and now it won't boot.

I'll fix it later...

I have almost 30 years of Windows troubleshooting experience...its just going to take time to build up my Linux experience.

[Huw the Poo]

Which file did you edit?  Xorg.conf?

[republic]

The recommended fix I saw said edit /etc/default/grub

I'll fiddle with it some more this evening.

[Huw the Poo]

That's bizarre; Grub is the bootloader (which is why messing with it has made the system unbootable).  I don't see why someone would tell you to edit that in order to do something with screen brightness.

Luckily, fixing it should be easy.  You just need to boot from a live cd and issue a command or two to reinstall Grub.  I haven't done this since the new version of Grub was released but you'll find a million articles explaining how to do it.

Edit: Like this one.

[republic]

The recommendation was to set the panel brightness control info into the bootup I suppose...

The fix was:    echo 50 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness

Once I run that command it drops the lcd brightness and the function buttons work.

The thing about Linux fixes is that I have no idea how I would have ever found that on my own.