Valve's Steam Frame dongle script says do not switch your Wi-Fi region to US
Valve's troubleshooting script for the Steam Frame wireless adapter tells Linux owners whose Wi-Fi regulatory domain has no 6GHz band not to switch it to US, and to tether the headset over USB instead. The script, frame-dongle-troubleshoot.sh, reached Valve's public SteamVR-for-Linux repository in five commits between September 25 and September 28.
The Steam Frame headset front-on between its two controllers on a beige background, from Valve's own product images. Image: Valve
A regulatory domain without a 6GHz band is the one failure the script treats as fatal, because the adapter has nowhere else to go: "the dongle will not work". Its advice to anyone tempted to tell Linux they live somewhere else is "please do not just blithely change your regulatory domain to US (or something similar)", followed by "The current recommended workaround is to use USB tethering."
The tethering route comes with its own instruction. "Put the headset into developer mode (Settings, System, Enable developer mode) and connect to the PC via USB", the script says, which is the whole of the fix it offers to an owner in that position.
Read this as code, not as a support article
Nothing here has been published as Valve guidance. It is a troubleshooting script committed to Valve's repository rather than a support page or a statement from the company, and it describes itself as "a very quickly-written script to try to track down and spot the most-commonly-seen problems with using the Steam Frame wireless dongle on Linux".
It is also still being revised. The 6GHz check was widened on September 26 "to allow JP regulatory domain", so until then the script had been telling Japanese owners the dongle would not work, and the current version is v0.3.
A warning about the headset appeared, then went
For 71 minutes on September 28 the script also warned that the Frame itself can pick the wrong region. A commit at 19:56 UTC added the lines "This is fine, UNLESS the headset has erroneously set itself to the US regulatory domain" and "Run 'iw reg get' on the *headset's* version of Linux, and if it says 'US' use 'sudo iw reg set [your country]' to correct this." Owners saw it only if their own regulatory domain did not use the whole 6GHz band.
A second commit at 21:07 UTC took both lines out again, under the message "More tweaks to troubleshooting script". Neither commit says why, the wording has not returned, and the variable the deleted check used, REG_BANDSIZE, is still worked out in the current version with nothing left to read it.
Kernel 7.2, the rtw89 driver and six ports
The script also puts numbers on what a Linux PC needs. It looks for the rtw89 driver first and, if that is missing, checks the kernel: "You are on kernel [version], and must be on kernel 7.2 or later for the driver to be available by default." Where the kernel is new enough and the driver still is not there, it says "the rtw89 driver appears to be missing and may not have been compiled for your distro".
SteamOS is exempt from the 7.2 figure. A comment in the code explains that the driver "IS manually installed on SteamOS even on older kernels", which is why the check looks for the driver before it looks at the version number.
When a firewall is running, the script cannot read its rules and instead lists what has to be open: TCP 27036 and 27037, and UDP 27031 and 27036, "or the Frame and the Steam client won't see each other". VR streaming needs two more, UDP 10400 and 10401. There is also a check for the simplest failure of all, since the adapter is a Wi-Fi device: "You have disabled wifi, which will also disable the dongle."
All of it is Linux-only advice, and it arrives while the adapter is still behind the headset. SteamOS 3.8.28 added preliminary adapter support without VR streaming, and Valve has separately confirmed that Frame streaming on Linux needs SteamVR started by hand. The script says it will be revised "as new things turn up".
