Location of Steam not taken into account when determining available space

steamclosed reviewed

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#178 · opened 2012-12-20 by rjnienaber · updated 2012-12-24 · 6 comments · github

Rrjnienaber 2012-12-20 github

Steam was installed to the default location (/home/richard/.local/share/Steam). I logged into Steam and then tried to download Team Fortress 2. It said I didn't have enough diskspace and reported my diskspace as 921 Mb. I then googled for how to download games to a different location and found the following knowledge base articles:

Moving a Steam Installation and Games
How do I install games on a different hard drive or location?

I moved my Steam folder from '/home/richard/.local/share/Steam' to '/media/richard/Stuff/Steam'. I then tried to run steam.sh from the location and got the following error:

$ bash steam.sh
steam.sh: line 12: cd: steam.sh: Not a directory
ln: failed to create symbolic link `/home/richard/.steam/root' -> `': No such file or directory
ln: failed to create symbolic link `/home/richard/.steam/steam' -> `': No such file or directory
steam.sh: line 286: /ubuntu12_32/steam: No such file or directory
steam.sh: line 307: exec: steam.sh: not found

I then added a symbolic to 'media/richard/Stuff/Steam' and though the client successfully ran as before, I still got the same lack of diskspace error.

My current disk setup is as follows:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda4        25G   23G  922M  97% /
udev            1.9G  4.0K  1.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs           774M   44M  730M   6% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            1.9G  1.3M  1.9G   1% /run/shm
none            100M   56K  100M   1% /run/user
/dev/sda6       470G  162G  308G  35% /media/richard/Stuff
/dev/sda2        98G   67G   32G  68% /media/richard/Windows

Other details:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 12.10
Release:    12.10
Codename:   quantal

$ uname -a
Linux richard-laptop 3.5.0-21-generic [#32](/issue/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/32)-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 11 18:51:59 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

FFreso 2012-12-21 github

I don't know how how Steam determines the available diskspace, but if it's calling du, it should be possible to add -D/--dereference-args to "follow" the symlink and use the space on the actual location of whatever place it's checking. If it's using some library or other, it should hopefully have a "dereference" setting/option as well...

Sscottlu 2012-12-21 github

Move your steam folder, then run /usr/bin/steam and it'll ask you where you put it.

Rrjnienaber 2012-12-21 github

I removed Steam (sudo dpkg -r steam) and then installed it again (dpkg -i steam_latest.deb). I then did the following:

Deleted everything in the Steam folder, except 'SteamApps', 'bin_steam.sh', 'steam.sh'
Moved '/home/richard/.local/share/Steam' to '/media/richard/Stuff/Steam'

I started Steam and it asked me if I'd like to reinstall or I'd moved the folder. I chose the new location of the folder but then I get the following error message:

Please pick a valid Steam content directory.

The directories I tried were:

/media/richard/Stuff
/media/richard/Stuff/Steam
/media/richard/Stuff/Steam/SteamApps

I get the same error if I move everything in the '/home/richard/.local/share/Steam' folder.

This issue seems to be related to this: [BUG] Can't install games to other folders/libraries

Rrjnienaber 2012-12-21 github

Okay, with the help of #steamlug on irc.freenode.org, I managed to figure out the problem. I dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu and '/media/richard/Stuff' is an NTFS partition. It seems the default ntfs filesystem support in Ubuntu doesn't support Linux file permissions, 'chmod a+x on steam.sh' has no effect. I followed this guide to remount the partition (explicitly using ntfs-3g). I then re-ran steam and now it picks up more disk space.

Sscottlu 2012-12-22 github

Good find on the ntfs / exec permissions issue.

Sslouken 2012-12-24 github

We'll add a knowledge-base article to help people with this in the future. Thanks!

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