My experience with Linux Day 2
My experience with Linux Day 2
I'd like it noted I'm an absolute Linux noob here.
Yesterday I had issues with Nvidia, which was fixed by switching to Pop!OS which worked swimmingly. Fedora failed at this spectacularly, Nobara, their Nvidia specific version, spectacularly so.
I also had issues with mounting a samba share. I have an asus router that's capable of hosting samba shares, but only in v1 of samba which as it turns out is disabled by default in Linux distros these days. Windows too but the fix for that is easier, just install the package. Anyways. I was able to get a temp fix going by enabling guest login and disabling the users server side, which was unsatisfying and only allowed me read access.
After following dozens of tutorials and reinstalling Pop!OS to clear my shenannigans I found a forum that had this listed.
client NTLMv2 auth = no
client use spnego = no
client min protocol = CORE
client max protocol = NT1
Post that under smb.conf (under workgroup=WORKGROUP... yes it matters) and it disables all versions of samba except for v1, which works for me since this is the only share I care about.
So now, I can log into my samba share, and I have full read write access, yay.
But I still couldn't figure out how to permanently mount this NAS, boo. I found some topics discussing adding a line to fstab to get it to mount on boot. After a few hours of poking I realized cifs was indeed not installed on PopOS! so the tutorial I was following was right, but still wrong.
After that I was at least getting an error, which referred me to mount.cifs(8) - Linux man page, which I'm pretty sure by arriving at that means I'm now a man.
//192.168.1.1/vault /media/alexandria cifs vers=1.0,_netdev,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,nofail,username=phanlix,password=******* 0 0
Was the final syntax to get the ball rolling, yes I know I should do a credentials file and link that, get off my back mom.
And finally... my samba v1 file share is mounted within Linux.... and there was much rejoicing, yay.
Anyways half the reason I made this post is so I can search it later if I ever need to do this godforsaken task again, as exactly zero of this was intuitive or easy. In fact, all of this could have been avoided if whoever wrote this decided not to baby me and left V1 protocols intact, despite the security risk. The fact is all these package still have V1 in them, they're just disabled by a really really in depth process, and reenabling them was... a pain in the rear.
I still am having another issue. I have a local external harddrive that's connected via USB. I got that mounted fine through Disk and changing the settings there, which automatically updates fstab for you (thanks to whomever made that user friendly at least). However, steam will NOT point to that drive no matter what I do, chmod 777 is already in play. Weirdly, I was able to manually add it through the steam console commands, but that seemed to start it's own instance of steam, and none of the changes saved, the drive was working great and installed a few games fine, but on reboot or even just closing and reopening steam it's disassociating.
So gotta say, so far, I do NOT love drive management in Linux. I guess shame on me for using something semi-obscure, but Christ. I literally have been working on this all day since I got up at 10am. User friendly this is not.
The goal still is to game on Linux, day 2 has passed and I'm closer to being ready to install games.
Day 3 will be spent figuring out how to get that damn USB drive on steam as a secondary install location.
Any tips would be appreciated. I've chmod 777'd the mounted drive. And I was able to add it via steam console manually, but it didn't save unfortunately and reset everything after I exited steam.
EDIT: Got it, there are other comments where I linked how within this thread.
I feel dumb for asking, but I did this and wow! Is the usb drive formatted as NTFS? Steam in Linux does not work on an NTFS partition. I read all of your day 1, and now I feel invested.
The USB drive was formatted as ext4. It was my steam library on windows, I figured having the native file system for a drive that's exclusively going to be used to run linux games was a good idea.
I did get it fixed, in the weirdest way possible. https://lemmy.world/comment/5325997
Maybe start again with the network share, if you don't mind. SambaV1 is outdated. You could set up a thin client, RasperryPi or similar for your network share. You could then format its HDD to ext4 or btrfs and install samba and nfs-kernelserver.
Same applies to your local steam library: better put your games on a Linux-native filesystem. It may safe you some headache.
Steam should recognize any monted hard drive and work straight away.
It may reset if you start Steam without the drive mounted, as it kinda expects it to be fixed.
It can also have issues running games from an NTFS disk. Try EXT4 if you can.
Hope you get everything working without further issues, Linux is great!
There's infinity between should and does sometimes.
So it was already ext4.
I ended up manually running the steam console as described here. Still wasn't able to use the gui to add a drive but I was able to use the console command to do it manually. Then I restarted to make sure everything was working. On starting steam again it was gone! So I full exited steam and opened console again, and somehow it was there! So I set the option under settings to start on boot thinking that it'd run the console edition again on boot and I could live with that.
Well it turns out somehow there are now 2 steam installs on my computer. I'm not gonna touch it since it's working, but my working theory is somehow running the console created a second steam on my pc. It did act like it was doing a full install the first time I booted on command line. Weird. But like I said it's working now. I may poke at it later and see if I can uninstall the redundant one, but I kinda don't wanna poke it.
Glad to see that you're handling well. Accessing a SMBv1 drive is not an easy task. I had an asus router with a USB port to serve via SMBv1, in the end I chose to set up a raspberry pi with sftp to mitigate the EternalBlue exploit.
Christ, I'm sure I'll care more about that sort of thing if I do get more into this. I know there's a firmware replacement for my asus router that's supposed to give better file sharing options, but I'm sketchy about firmware updates. I've had a few go bad over my lifetime and I don't want to replace a router that's that expensive right now.
So... I just fixed my external hdd issue, in the weirdest way possible.
I found how to access steam console here. It also had a line for manually adding a mounted drive through the console. That worked fine. Then I restarted and reopened steam and the drive wasn't there. So I exited and opened steam console again, and boom there it was. So I went into settings and told the steam console version to start on boot and that actually worked.
Looking at my apps though, searching for steam, there appear to be 2 separate installed versions of steam. Idk how that happened I'm very sure I only installed it once. I think somehow running the steam console literally created a second version of steam somehow. Idk though. It's working now so I'm not gonna analyze it too much.
smb4k, while primarily for KDE, is awesome for samba shares.
You might want to give it a spin.
Jesus, now you tell me. Tempting to undo everything and give that a spin, but on the otherhand shit's actually working right now.
I will try that!
Did not you liked it? That is Linux experience to solve things!
... gonna be honest, not really.
SMB1 is an issue I had to solve in windows too, but that was way easier because all you had to do was enable the package and you were good. This issue of using my external hdd and the driver issues with Nvidia I had with the other distros was just an unpleasant experience all around. The linux experience so far is it takes me hours to do things that it takes me minutes to do in Windows, and issues that were never issues in Windows are issues here.
For example. I have a 55in TV as my secondary monitor. I usually on windows turn up the scaling on that monitor. On linux it doesn't appear that that's possible as the scaling is linked across all screens.
I can work with it for now, but frankly that and other issues are starting to add up and make me yearn for the comfort of a familiar OS. I promised myself I'd do this for a week to see if Linux really is viable to me as an OS though because I'm not pleased about the direction MS is going.
Well shit, I just figured out the scaling issue. That was legit a noob move. The scale control is in the Nvidia controls on windows. On linux it's under the xorg settings. So, one less thing to complain about.