How can I install steam games to an external drives/mount points with Ubuntu 18.04? (solution found)

A possible solution has been given to this problem

I am new to Ubuntu, and I am eager to completely delete Windows from my PC. But I have a problem.

I have installed Steam on my PC running Ubuntu 18.04, but for the life of me I cannot get games to install on another hard drive.

I have already gone through steam settings and tried to manually change the location, but it restricts my installation points to the /home/someuser directory. (It will not let me access other areas of the computer.)

I have even tried to mount a drive to /home/someuser (with the correct read and write permission parameters). It does not show up in steam. So then i tried to create the same directory through the Steam Installation interface. I can create a folder location with the same name that the drive is mounted to, but it still says it's saving to the drive my Linux build is installed on (not the mounted drive.).

I have also tried manually adding a mount point that I created: /media/steamgames (what I named one of my mount points) to Steam. I get a read/write permission error. (but I changed the permission on the mount point to 777 and gave ownership to my someuser.

Both of the drives that I am attempting to install to are formatted as ext4. Additionally, I tried to make a permanent mount through /etc/fstab (that didn't work either.).

Mounting folder into home folder

When I try to add a folder all this available is folders in the home dir. When I try to add a folder with the same name as the mounted drive or add a /media point, I get this error:

failed to create a folder, this drive is read-only.

The are the revisions I made to /etc/fstab:

#Entry for /dev/sdd1
UUID=ebd692b7-333f-4c60-9031-624a97b07b5d /media/Steam ext4 rw,users,exec,auto 0 0 #Entry for /dev/sdc2 : UUID=0d688471-2966-4fe7-af74-d639e83f224b /home/cory/1.0TB-Hard-Disk ext4 rw,users,exec,auto 0 0

Ls -la on my home dir

cory@Cory-MS-7A38:~$ ls -la
total 208
drwxr-xr-x 31 cory cory 4096 四 16 20:36 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 一 13 14:09 ..
drwxrwxrwx 4 cory cory 4096 四 15 22:21 1.0TB-Hard-Disk

Here is a picture of what I see in my Steam gallery. As stated, I have already tried to add the drive that I mounted to /home/cory/1.0TB-Hard-Disk. But apparently something is wrong because it only have 3gigs of space on it.

2 Answers

In the end, I found out the reason for the problem.

Steam (or at least my version of Steam) is installed with Flatpak. Flatpak does not actually have access to the /home directory filesystem. it creates a sandbox environment in Home/user/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam

To manually override this, I created a mount point outside of /home (IT IS IMPORTANT TO DO THIS OUTSIDE OF HOME OR IT COULD MESS SOMETHING UP) I named my mount point /media/1.0TB-Hard-Disk

Then

flatpak override --user --filesystem=/media/1.0TB-Hard-Disk com.valvesoftware.Steam

More information about this can be found here:

From your description is is hard determine what causes the permission error. So here is something you can try:

Mount the external disk for a new user

Add the external disk to /etc/fstab and mount it to a home of a new user:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=0d688471-2966-4fe7-af74-d639e83f224b /home/steamuser ext4 rw 0 0

Then create the folder and user:

$ sudo mkdir -p /home/steamuser
$ sudo adduser steamuser
Adding user `steamuser' ...
Adding new group `steamuser' (1001) ...
Adding new user `steamuser' (1001) with group `steamuser' ...
The home directory `/home/steamuser' already exists. Not copying from `/etc/skel'.
adduser: Warning: The home directory `/home/steamuser' does not belong to the user you are currently creating.
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
Changing the user information for steamuser
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default Full Name []: Room Number []: Work Phone []: Home Phone []: Other []:
Is the information correct? [Y/n]
## Copy skeleton
$ sudo cp -Tr /etc/skel /home/steamuser
## Set owner and group
$ sudo chown -R steamuser:steamuser /home/steamuser/
## should look like this:
$ ls -la /home/steamuser/
total 48
drwxr-xr-x 3 steamuser steamuser 4096 Apr 17 17:06 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Apr 17 17:00 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 steamuser steamuser 220 Apr 17 17:06 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 steamuser steamuser 3771 Apr 17 17:06 .bashrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 steamuser steamuser 8980 Apr 17 17:06 examples.desktop
drwx------ 2 steamuser steamuser 16384 Apr 17 16:59 lost+found
-rw-r--r-- 1 steamuser steamuser 807 Apr 17 17:06 .profile

Then login (via GUI) as steamuser and install and run steam. Don't copy stuff from your old home, maybe that is part of the problem.