When first starting, I had a lot of issues with the SteamVR software crashing on startup due to problems with the compositor starting properly. After about a day of troubleshooting, I this issue went away when I changed a setting in my Nvidia Control Panel to globally prefer using my Nvidia high performance card over my integrated graphics card.

I changed the following setting from "Auto Select" to "High-performance graphics":

I'm not confident that changing that setting was the change that fixed the problem, but as well as I know issues and crashes where the error message complains about the "Compositor" mean that SteamVR is trying to use the wrong graphics card on the PC.

My eventual fix for this issue was to upgrade the system's GPU. After putting a decent NVIDIA GPU in the tower, SteamVR would boot with no issue.

I fixed this issue using this thread from the pyopenvr repository.

First, installed the following packages on aptitude:

• libudev-dev
• libvulkan-dev
• libsdl2-dev
• libglfw3-dev

I set my LD_LIBRARY_PATH to

/home/<user>/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64:/home/<user>/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/tools/bin/linux64:.

And according to the above thread, the libudev.so.1 object needs to be linked to libudev.so.0 on Linux, using

sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0

Creating this link fixed the above problem for me, but according to an askubuntu thread, this fix can break Unity.

Run the following commands in order, and try after each line to run the tracking example to test if the problem has been fixed:

# ./build/track won't run, "Unable to init VR runtime: vrclient Shared Lib Not Found (102)"
sudo apt install libudev-dev libvulkan-dev libsdl2-dev libglfw3-dev

# ./build/track won't run, "Unable to init VR runtime: vrclient Shared Lib Not Found (102)"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SteamVR/bin/linux64:$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/tools/bin/linux64:.

# ./build/track won't run, "Unable to init VR runtime: vrclient Shared Lib Not Found (102)"
sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0

Solution: Attach the HMD to the computer

Solution: Start Steam VR