Disclaimer: I am very new to Linux (1 week).
I have installed the Valve version of Steam on LMDE6. I have used Disks to automatically mount the NTFS drive I used with Windows (doesn’t hold bootloader, it is just for Steam library storage) at boot ( /media/[username]/Gaming ) and I made it the default library folder in Steam.
Running games works perfectly (actually, performance is surprisingly good), but I cannot install them due to a “disk write error”.
I looked for solutions and found this page, from which I understand that I need to change permissions to the mounting point, but when I do, using chown -R, I get a “Read-only filesystem” error for all files and folders.
I can see no options to fix this in Disks and I tried to edit fstab once, but it messed things up so badly I had to use the USB drive with the portable installer to fix things.
NTFS support on Linux has never been good, iirc it still mounts NTFS as read-only by default. You can remount it as R/W, but it isn’t exactly recommended
If you absolutely want to share the steam library between windows and Linux, id recommend either a second disk formatted as exFAT or a new storage partition on the same disk formatted as exFAT
The key here is exFAT, one of the best options for cross-OS compatibility
Edit: @biofaust@lemmy.world I just saw your reply to someone else in the thread that your steam library is on a separate drive already
So that’s perfect! Just move everything off it temporarily and format it with exFAT filesystem and you should be fine
Thanks, I’ll try the formatting thing asap.
Does it save me from the risk of filenames including colons etc that others were talking about?
Yea the filename issue should be fine, there’s a risk of corruption with exFAT though as @tal@lemmy.today mentioned, but if you’re just storing steam games or other easily replaceable data, I wouldn’t worry about it to much IMO