CrossOver Support - Community Forums

I realise the whole point of WINE and Crossover Games is to run apps on Linux, and I have had some success running Half-Life, Portal, etc on CXG. However, what I'd like to do is to multi-boot into XP/Win7 alongside Linux, so that games that don't run at all in WINE can still be played, and keep the same Steam folder as well.

I'd like to put the steamapps directory, and maybe more, in a shared partition - FAT32 or NTFS-3G, preferably the latter for Windows but it may be a bit slow for WINE. The various ext2 options for Windows look a bit untested by comparison, and this posting says that ext2 IFS on Windows doesn't work with Steam: http://www.aehgts.net/blog/owen/2009/vista-ext2-and-steam

Is it advisable to put the whole of .cxgames on a shared disk partition, and will it work on NTFS-3G as long as I have the partition mounted as my userid?

I've just found this link which says that a symbolic link to a steamapps directory on NTFS-3G will corrupt the games' GCF files - however linking to the GCF files apparently does work, which would be OK though not great: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux#Wine.2C_Steam_.26_ntfs-3g ... The WINE page for Steam says that this is fixed in Linux kernel 2.6.26 (search for ntfs): http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iVersionId=1554

So it's still unclear whether I need to special symlinks, upgrade the kernel, or what. Suggestions welcome.

I create my symlinks in the other direction: I have my .cxgames directory on ext4, and also installed Steam in there. However I symlink "shared" GCF files and directories from the SteamApps/common directory to the ntfs-3g mount of my windows partition. That works fine so far, without any noticeable trouble. What I don't know though is, how that will behave with games using Valve's new copy protection scheme - i.e. I don't know how exactly the exe files are secured, whether they are bound to an account or to a machine (which would probably involve installation dependant settings).

Hi,

Afaik, the game content is bound by your steam account credentials, not by machine unique
magic serial numbers. I have a few test rigs, use a couple of Steam accounts, and I can move
steamapp from one machine to another no problem -- provided I login with the Steam account info
tied to a specific steamapp purchase, it all works fine. That said, it's perhaps not 100% proof...
...and I never like sharing diskbased filesystems using 2 OS types on the one machine - I think
that invites danger or opens the door for Murphy or such...

...it is that some Steam titles, aside from having the Steam frontend shield, also have tertiary
DRM/ownership checks as well, and these things can be machine specific -- it's no big deal in
the Steam case, because these components are regenerated upon successful login to your steam
account...I'm merely pointing out it's not ~only~ the Steam system itself 'on guard' in all cases.

I don't know anything much about this new 'cloud' thang they've got going, but watching it doing
it's synch shizzle would make me cautious about what filesystem types you were working with here
and/or what filesystem flags might be applied to a given partition....but, like I often say and
do myself in testing, one of the most endearing features of the crossover system, is being able to
archive your working bottles and put them safely aside....then go totally nutso with your existing
crossover install, mutate it, pour acid over it, bang it with a hammer until it breaks, and when or
if you manage to kill it outright, you can go "Hmmm, okay then, that certainly isn't the way to do
it..", and just blow the whole installation away altogether, install crossover fresh, restore your
archived bottles...hey presto!...you're back to where you started before you took to it with an axe .. 8)

As long as you archive your bottles first, have those backups and can recover, experimentation is
a valid option....but you should be ok ..I think...(I'm not sure what happens if you're sharing an
ntfs formatted partition)..

Cheers!

Andreas Schneider wrote:

I create my symlinks in the other direction: I have my .cxgames
directory on ext4, and also installed Steam in there. However I
symlink "shared" GCF files and directories from the SteamApps/common
directory to the ntfs-3g mount of my windows partition. That works
fine so far, without any noticeable trouble. What I don't know
though is, how that will behave with games using Valve's new copy
protection scheme - i.e. I don't know how exactly the exe files are
secured, whether they are bound to an account or to a machine (which
would probably involve installation dependant settings).

That sounds similar to my scheme - GCFs etc live on the NTFS partition, and are linked from under .cxgames' steamapps directory. Any suggestions on which files are safe to symlink like this?

Not sure what you mean by Valve's new copy protection scheme - is this the CEG DRM used in L4D2?

Artist Formally Known as Dot wrote:

Hi,

Afaik, the game content is bound by your steam account
credentials, not by machine unique
magic serial numbers. ...

Thanks for the feedback - comes down to DRM, but I'd hope that Steam Cloud (which is really just 2-way syncing of game data) would work fine when multi-booting, particularly when using an NTFS partition - after rebooting into either Windows or Linux, it should look the same to the sync process as if you have booted a new PC that magically has files that are already in sync from the previous boot, i.e. it's the same as 2 separate PCs. At least that's the theory.

Good points about bottle archiving - the trouble is that Steam encourages you to put everything into one bottle with many games, but I have bought a new 1 TB disk just to act as backup so at least it will be relatively quick to do this.

Some more data on ext2 IFS on Windows 7 / Vista - seems like some of the options are prone to data loss, see the first comment here: http://kwlug.org/node/750

Richard D wrote:

Thanks for the feedback - comes down to DRM, but I'd hope that Steam
Cloud (which is really just 2-way syncing of game data) would work
fine when multi-booting, particularly when using an NTFS partition -
after rebooting into either Windows or Linux, it should look the
same to the sync process as if you have booted a new PC that
magically has files that are already in sync from the previous boot,
i.e. it's the same as 2 separate PCs. At least that's the theory.

Good points about bottle archiving - the trouble is that Steam
encourages you to put everything into one bottle with many games,
but I have bought a new 1 TB disk just to act as backup so at least
it will be relatively quick to do this.

Yeah, building a bottle archive 'collection' of steamapps is a different kettle of fish. You might have alterations to suit the games themselves as part of the Steam bottle, or else you have something included/altered inside the steammapp's installdir. Generally what I do is make steam_based backups of all my Steam games, and keep those in a separate directory. Once all the titles themselves are backed-up like this, then I delete all the local game content from within Steam, and then backup (cxarchive) the Steam bottle itself (without the games installed), that way I keep any bottle specific makeup intact for the Steam installation. Seems to work very well handled like this (lessons learnt after the recent Steam UI update ;)

Cheers!

For what it's worth, I and some of my colleagues routinely move the "steamapps" directory out of the bottle and then replace it with a symlink to its new out-of-bottle location. That way it can be shared among bottles, or we can delete our Steam bottles without fear of losing our game downloads, etc. (With a new installation of Steam in a new bottle, we just re-create the symlink after running Steam once.)