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I tried to follow the instructions of the last commenter on this post: Change program installation locations But when I followed the instructions of the last poster and tried to install a program in CO 22.1.1, it just created a new folder called .cxoffice on my home drive folder instead of using the symlink I created (named .cxoffice) to point to the external hdd folder ".cxoffice.". Any help would be great.

Hi, Sheila! Apparently it was me the "last poster" ! :-)

Could you please open a terminal and run the following commands:

cd ~
ls -la .cxoffice

then copy and paste the resulting output here?

Thanks!

First, let me start with this:
Didn't expect to actually get help (since I mostly don't here..lol) so I had already went back and renamed the .cxoffice_old in my home folder to .cxoffice and deleted the symlink. So this morning, I went and recreated the symlink to the external .csoffice folder and again renamed the home/.cxoffice to .csoffice_old. Then just to be sure of the same results, I opened CO and there were no games showing like they did before I did this. Regardless, I tried to install a new game and see if it again created that folder on the home drive. It now freezes up even trying to create the bottle. But here is the output you requested:

myviolinsings@myviolinsings-desktop:~$ cd ~
myviolinsings@myviolinsings-desktop:~$ ls -la .cxoffice
lrwxrwxrwx 1 myviolinsings myviolinsings 41 May 10 08:55 .cxoffice -> /media/myviolinsings/easystore1/.cxoffice

Hi, Sheila!

DId you copy the contents from the .cxoffice_old (including subfolders) to /media/myviolinsigs/easystore1/.cxoffice prior to running CO, as explained in step A-3 of the instructions?

Yes. And I never deleted that folder ".cxoffice" from the external drive when I removed the symlink on home/. The only thing I know to try is to start over with your original instructions from scratch: 1)delete the external drive .cxoffice folder (that includes all the games previously installed via CO) 2) rename home/.cxoffice_old to home/.cxoffice. 3) Open CO and see that all installs show up. 4) copy home/.cxoffice folder/subfolders to external drive; 5) create symlink on /home to the new folder .cxoffice on external drive.

I guess let me go through these steps and see if anything changes and then look at the terminal output you asked for.

Thanks so much for your help. Hopefully, we can get this working.

Before I copy the home folder to the external drive, I opened and saw all the files from my original CO installs. And they are in fact still there. But opening CO before doing anything else, that one file I used and installed yesterday is all that is showing up. Is there some setting in CO that affects this? I am attaching the screenshots of the folders/files list in the .cxoffice currently on home as well as the shot of CO only showing one bottle, the one I installed after doing all of the stuff yesterday:

cxoffice folder contents
Crossover only has one bottle

Hmm... I guess I know what is happening. Probably you shutdown your computer or suspends it from one they to the following day. Then your external drive gets unmounted.

When this happens, all that is left is the folder at /media/myviolinsigs/easystore1/

Explaining better, when you mount your external drive to this path, you access your external drive contents with it. If you don't mount it, you are accessing a real path in your internal drive.

The easiest solution is to mount your external drive exactly to this path before running Crossover.

The less easy solution is to change your /etc/fstab file, but I would need to research how to do it (I always forget exactly how to do so...). But if you do so, I think that your external drive gets automatically mounted everytime.

Hope this is your solution.

Sheila G Flanagan wrote:

Before I copy the home folder to the external drive, I opened and saw all the files from my original CO installs. And they are in fact still there. But opening CO before doing anything else, that one file I used and installed yesterday is all that is showing up. Is there some setting in CO that affects this? I am attaching the screenshots of the folders/files list in the .cxoffice currently on home as well as the shot of CO only showing one bottle, the one I installed after doing all of the stuff yesterday:

cxoffice folder contents
Crossover only has one bottle

I understand your thinking, as yes I have been having to reboot a lot since upgrading to 23.04 due to sys updates, but my easystore auto mounts every reboot. Maybe because I previously, in 22.10 was going to use it for the home drive, and I remember doing the edit to fstab, but I must have done it wrong, as stuff never saved to it, only on the internal home drive. Right now it is still copying the .cxoffice folder from home to easystore. BUT, what you said about fstab, I am currently thinking about trying again to move the home folder to easystore (it has 2 tb available I could use as a home partition). If I do that, do I even need to move the CO file to easystore? I was worried about doing it before thinking CO would be messed up trying to find the files, but if it looks in home and home is on the ext hdd, would that in effect be the same thing? Sorry for confusion, it's just there are some issues with 23.04 that are bugging me and wondering if I should revert back to 22.04 and that would be easier if my home drive was on a separate partition so I could just do a clean install and use my timeshift backup to restore settings.

Your home partition on an external drive? Well, it COULD work, I guess. At least if you are sure that the home partition would be mounted BEFORE you log into your user account...

That said, I suspect strongly that sometimes your external drive was mounted and sometimes it was not... So maybe it is NOT correctly mounted all the times...

Good luck, anyway!

I think the problem might be that even though it appeared in file manager that all files from /home had copied to the ext hdd, they had not. Because when I started over yesterday, it was still copying when I got up this morning. That tells me that I dismissed the notification? and yet it was still copying so everything was NOT there when I opened CO. That also tells me how slow it is to use that ext hdd so I do not think I will change the home directory and that is also probably why it seemed frozen when I was used to it instantly creating the new bottle and installing the program but it was taking so long once it used the ext hdd. Thanks for all your help.

An external HDD SHOULD be fast enough for use, even for launching Crossover programs. What is the interface you are using? e-SATA, USB 2 or USB 3?

I am using USB 3 for the easystore 5 tb HDD

I was finally able to access the easystore webpage on Western Digital site (westerndigital.com/products/portable-drives/wd-easystore-portable-3-0-hdd#WDBAJN0010BBK-WESE). I don't recommend you use it as your home directory, because it's impressive how many people give a low score to the product in their own webpage. Also, I couldn't find details on their "easystore" backup software. Maybe it's messing up with things?