What happens in the client? Do you get an error dialog or something? Does the install continue or just stop? Where are you installing to?
The error spew seems correct in that it's trying to access your NFS server but that's unavailable, so the spew itself isn't an issue.
Sorry, I should have provided the symptoms in the initial report. Anyway, I noticed this problem because the client completely freezes up whenever I hit the install button. Now that I think about it, though, when the /mnt automount is unavailable, every program that tries to access /mnt freezes up, even ls.
I assumed that this was a steam bug because I didn't make the connection between the steam client and other programs that try to access the automount dir. I install my games to ~/.steam (actually ~/.local/share/Steam, now that I look at the symlinks). At any rate, the steam install dir is completely separated from the automount dir. (I assume the client is trying to get info on all known mount points and then freezing up when it hits a dead automount.)
This was on 64-bit Arch Linux.
Yes, I would guess the Steam client is checking disk space on all mount points, I'm not sure we can do much about that but we'll see.
Nothing extracted yet.
I get the following errors on the console when I attempt to install a new game:
/home/buildbot/buildslave_steam/steam_rel_client_ubuntu12_linux/build/src/tier1/../tier1/fileio.cpp (2932) : Assertion Failed: Failed to determine free disk space for /mnt, error 4
/home/buildbot/buildslave_steam/steam_rel_client_ubuntu12_linux/build/src/tier1/../tier1/fileio.cpp 2932 Assertion Failed: Failed to determine free disk space for /mnt, error 4[{WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 0}], 0, NULL) = 692
My /mnt directory is configured as an autofs mountpoint to an NFS server, which is currently unavailable. I can work around the problem easily enough by stopping the automount daemon.