I'd like it noted I'm an absolute Linux noob here.
Yesterday I had issues with Nvidia, which was fixed by switching to Pop!OS which worked swimmingly. Fedora failed at this spectacularly, Nobara, their Nvidia specific version, spectacularly so.
I also had issues with mounting a samba share. I have an asus router that's capable of hosting samba shares, but only in v1 of samba which as it turns out is disabled by default in Linux distros these days. Windows too but the fix for that is easier, just install the package. Anyways. I was able to get a temp fix going by enabling guest login and disabling the users server side, which was unsatisfying and only allowed me read access.
After following dozens of tutorials and reinstalling Pop!OS to clear my shenannigans I found a forum that had this listed.
client NTLMv2 auth = no
client use spnego = no
client min protocol = CORE
client max protocol = NT1
Post that under smb.conf (under workgroup=WORKGROUP... yes it matters) and it disables all versions of samba except for v1, which works for me since this is the only share I care about.
So now, I can log into my samba share, and I have full read write access, yay.
But I still couldn't figure out how to permanently mount this NAS, boo. I found some topics discussing adding a line to fstab to get it to mount on boot. After a few hours of poking I realized cifs was indeed not installed on PopOS! so the tutorial I was following was right, but still wrong.
After that I was at least getting an error, which referred me to mount.cifs(8) - Linux man page, which I'm pretty sure by arriving at that means I'm now a man.
//192.168.1.1/vault /media/alexandria cifs vers=1.0,_netdev,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,nofail,username=phanlix,password=******* 0 0
Was the final syntax to get the ball rolling, yes I know I should do a credentials file and link that, get off my back mom.
And finally... my samba v1 file share is mounted within Linux.... and there was much rejoicing, yay.
Anyways half the reason I made this post is so I can search it later if I ever need to do this godforsaken task again, as exactly zero of this was intuitive or easy. In fact, all of this could have been avoided if whoever wrote this decided not to baby me and left V1 protocols intact, despite the security risk. The fact is all these package still have V1 in them, they're just disabled by a really really in depth process, and reenabling them was... a pain in the rear.
I still am having another issue. I have a local external harddrive that's connected via USB. I got that mounted fine through Disk and changing the settings there, which automatically updates fstab for you (thanks to whomever made that user friendly at least). However, steam will NOT point to that drive no matter what I do, chmod 777 is already in play. Weirdly, I was able to manually add it through the steam console commands, but that seemed to start it's own instance of steam, and none of the changes saved, the drive was working great and installed a few games fine, but on reboot or even just closing and reopening steam it's disassociating.
So gotta say, so far, I do NOT love drive management in Linux. I guess shame on me for using something semi-obscure, but Christ. I literally have been working on this all day since I got up at 10am. User friendly this is not.
The goal still is to game on Linux, day 2 has passed and I'm closer to being ready to install games.
Day 3 will be spent figuring out how to get that damn USB drive on steam as a secondary install location.
Any tips would be appreciated. I've chmod 777'd the mounted drive. And I was able to add it via steam console manually, but it didn't save unfortunately and reset everything after I exited steam.
EDIT: Got it, there are other comments where I linked how within this thread.
I feel dumb for asking, but I did this and wow! Is the usb drive formatted as NTFS? Steam in Linux does not work on an NTFS partition. I read all of your day 1, and now I feel invested.
I did get it fixed, in the weirdest way possible. https://lemmy.world/comment/5325997
The USB drive was formatted as ext4. It was my steam library on windows, I figured having the native file system for a drive that's exclusively going to be used to run linux games was a good idea.
Maybe start again with the network share, if you don't mind. SambaV1 is outdated. You could set up a thin client, RasperryPi or similar for your network share. You could then format its HDD to ext4 or btrfs and install samba and nfs-kernelserver.
Same applies to your local steam library: better put your games on a Linux-native filesystem. It may safe you some headache.
Or.... and hear me out here. I could use my router as I bought it for and continue to use samba and the FTP server that it so graciously provides me. If someone wants to see what TV shows I watch, what books I read, and what porn I'm into they're welcome to it. There's nothing on that drive that would cost me money or that I ultimately care about, and on the rare occasion I do have to put something on there that is important, it's easy enough to password encrypt a zip file until I get it somewhere a tad more secure.
It's actually super convenient, and was easy to set up and get connected on my phone and various devices. Strangely enough Linux was the only one of literally every OS that exists that gave me issues, imagine that.
I may... someday soon replace the firmware on my router with some after market shit that upgrades the samba version, but I've had a bad time with firmware updates in the past and I don't have $300 to replace a high end router at the moment.
Steam should recognize any monted hard drive and work straight away.
It may reset if you start Steam without the drive mounted, as it kinda expects it to be fixed.
It can also have issues running games from an NTFS disk. Try EXT4 if you can.
Hope you get everything working without further issues, Linux is great!
There's infinity between should and does sometimes.
So it was already ext4.
I ended up manually running the steam console as described here. Still wasn't able to use the gui to add a drive but I was able to use the console command to do it manually. Then I restarted to make sure everything was working. On starting steam again it was gone! So I full exited steam and opened console again, and somehow it was there! So I set the option under settings to start on boot thinking that it'd run the console edition again on boot and I could live with that.
Well it turns out somehow there are now 2 steam installs on my computer. I'm not gonna touch it since it's working, but my working theory is somehow running the console created a second steam on my pc. It did act like it was doing a full install the first time I booted on command line. Weird. But like I said it's working now. I may poke at it later and see if I can uninstall the redundant one, but I kinda don't wanna poke it.
Love that line lololol
You might have a Flatpak and a DEB install. If you tried the Flatpak first, you could have had a permission issue in the container, impeding your access to the drive. Installing the permissionless DEB via console is what probably fixed it. If you see these two packages installed separately you got your answer.
The Linux community has a terrible habit of telling newbies to run console commands without explaining to them what its actually doing and what the issue actually is, it makes everything 10000% more confusing.
"There’s infinity between should and does sometimes." Love that line and so true for Linux.
Life in general really.