Running steam with steamapps folder symlinked

[crayZsaaron]

I'm running Arch Linux x64, and I had Steam working very well, Source games and all. However, I also have a windows partition with Steam installed (and a bunch of games downloaded), so I attempted to symbolically link my steamapps folder from my windows drive (after backing up my original steamapps folder, of course). When navigating through my file system, everything seems to work fine... I can enter ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Steam/steamapps and view every game that was installed on my windows partition. However, when I try to boot Steam now, I get the steam error that says "Could not connect to steam network". I switched back to my old steamapps folder and everything works fine.

Any help?

Thanks.

[vitamin]

The obvious answer - this won't work. Steam doesn't like when steamapps directory is somewhere else. Also note that some games will not work this way at all. They will have to revalidate (read redownload) all of their content.

[Dorfwine]

This actually works quite well - I've done it for a few years now with no problems whatsoever, though there's likely a slightly increased load time. See this link for the Valve how-to - https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wik ... t_machines

I've seen your 'could not connect to steam network' error before, and it has always meant "You idiot, you forgot to mount the Windows partition before starting Steam."