Hello,
I converted my primary OS to Fedora from windows. I ended up formatting my dedicated ‘games’ SSD to EXT4 to try to mitigate compatibility issues. Currently, I need to un-mount and re-mount that partition to be able to launch any games installed on it after every cold boot. I’ve attached a screenshot of how I have that drive configured. Dolphin and Steam both recognize and can view that drive. At a loss for where to go next
Does it actually auto-mount cleanly after every cold boot?
The fact that you say you have to unmount it implies it does get mounted automatically, so what do you get when you try to cd /mnt/Games. Presumably, you can see it under /mnt, but when you try to use it… what happens?
Hey Steve, thanks for the reply. I suspect you may be correct. This is the output of that cd:
You mount it with a capital G but cd into lower caseg`.
ls -al /mnt after booting
You could also try mounting it under /run/media/youruserename\games and pointing your steam installation there instead. Might keep selinux a little happier.
You’re right, I still forget that Linux is case sensitive.
The cd worked just fine. Here’s the output of the ls
the three bottom directories are no longer used.
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t specifying the user mount option like you’ve done here also implicitly mount it as noexec, meaning you can’t run executables stored on the filesystem unless it’s also mounted as exec? Could this be why you need to remount it to actually run games off it?
OK then - we know it mounts automatically without issues. At this point you can’t run Steam games from it, though, if I understand correctly.
What do you actually do to remount this device when you want to play something - you say you have to unmount and remount it - how precisely do you do this? It may be as simple as @stormscape says, and we need to change the automount flags, but without know what you actually execute or do, we can but guess.
Steve,
It may help to lay out the process start to finish;
- boot PC, GRUB opens fedora
- Steam auto-starts and drives purportedly auto-mount
- open steam, try to run game
- steam says “launching” and then quickly goes back to showing nothing running. Nothing ever pops up.
- open KDE partition manager (provide sudo pw), navigate to Games partition, right click unmount, then mount.
- attempt to run game again, it works.
Can you show us the contents of your /etc/fstab file? It’s sounding more and more like the drive is getting mounted with noexec.
Okay so we’ve found the root of the problem. When a filesystem is mounted with the users option, noexec is implied unless exec is also added. Programs can only be executed off of it if it’s mounted as root. Mounting as root won’t affect r/w permissions, only that you’ll need to use sudo to mount and unmount it. So if you remove users from that mount option, it should work normally.
Alternatively, if you wish to keep it unmountable without using sudo, add exec as a mount option next to users.
Eg. nofail,users,exec
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Wow, that fixed it! Thank you so much.
Curious, why does ‘users’ default to noexec? That doesn’t make sense to me.
Principle of least privilege.
users allows anyone on the system to mount the file system. However, that means anyone can mount anything, which could be bad if I for example, mount a file system with nefarious software on it. If I can then run it, I can basically do anything I like. Insta-rootkit basically.
The user flag grants a significant ability (mounting) to an unprivileged user, so the system compensates by immediately applying the most common security-hardening options (noexec, nosuid, nodev) to limit the potential misuse of that ability.
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That makes sense!
Thank you both so very much for the help.