If you move the Steam home directory of $STEAMROOT in Linux then you are running the risk of running rm -rf on your user directory, which in the case of this unfortunate person on Slashdot included their attached USB hard drive. This is rather nasty bug and one which is easily avoidable by the use of proper syntax but unfortunately the command rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* contains an unnecessary / and without an error checking facility included if there is no $STEAMROOT directory the command run is rm -rf "/"*. As it is in your home folder you do not even need to be running as root so for the time being it would be very wise to leave your Steam files in their default location and to realize that anything plugged into your machine is not a true backup until removed from your system.
"I launched steam. It did not launch, it offered to let me browse, and still could not find it when I pointed to the new location. Steam crashed. I restarted it. It re-installed itself and everything looked great. Until I looked and saw that steam had apparently deleted everything owned by my user recursively from the root directory. Including my 3tb external drive I back everything up to that was mounted under /media."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Xen Hypervisor 4.5 arrives with 64-bit ARM processor support @ The Inquirer
- Medic! Intel can't staunch bleeding from mobile chip biz @ The Register
- Ex-Apple, Intel, Google geeks in line for $415m over wage-fix pacts @ The Register
Gaben just helps you free
Gaben just helps you free space for SteamOS!
Something thrown, but no
Something thrown, but no catcher there to catch it, the sounds of broken glass, and much cursing as the ball goes careening through the pane, and takes out the chandelier. A regulation backstop would have helped, installers Beware!
Two is one and one is none.
Two is one and one is none.
Heh, my SteamOS install
Heh, my SteamOS install recently broke itself by updating.
I mean, I might have been partially to blame – I rebooted the system when it seemed to be frozen even though that might have been some later stage of the update taking place, but it wouldn’t tell me that’s what’s happening and the OS wouldn’t react to inputs.
Oh well, my laptop couldn’t handle the horrible Open GL version of Wargame anyway.
I have had problems like that
I have had problems like that with windows, and having a system image backup sure comes in handy, Linux has disk image backups too, it’s great to always have disk image backups, especially when running a BETA OS. For sure rebooting will BORK any OS update, if done prematurely, Even windows is not going to recover if the system locks up during an OS update, and nothing beats having a disk image copy, on a backup disk, NOT attached to the PC/laptop when The $hit hits that fan. OpenGL is fine, some implementations of OpenGL, on OEM laptops, is not so great, even in in windows, and Steam OS is a work in progress, thanks for the BETA testing, you’ll thank Gaben for that percentage that M$ cannot skim of the top, in addition Steam’s/Other service’s charges, because without an alternative, it would be an uber closed ecosystem ahead of all of us.
Oh wow, oops!
Oh wow, oops!
There appears to be confusion
There appears to be confusion when describing the Steam Client as “Steam”, even among the expert commentards at the Register. It would help if the technical press would disambiguate “Steam” from Steam OS, by either always calling the cross OS platform service that provides the games, the Steam Client, or adding a note at the bottom of the article indicating what Valve software is being discussed, and mentioned in the headline. Since Valve’s Steam Offerings will include the Steam OS, as well as the cross OS platform/service the Steam Client.
Note: Sure in the old days where “Steam” was only the Steam Client/service that one word name had some coolness to it(Valve, Steam, association/play of words), but now that there is Steam OS, in addition to the Steam Client, and Steam Machines(PCs in their own right), just using “Steam” without qualification, when titling headlines/articles about a problem, will lead to confusion.
In the old days technical journalists were actually well versed in their fields, and provided the appropriate explanations, either parenthetical short explanations, or
disambiguations, or more detailed notes to avoid reader, confusion, among novices, and sometime even the well versed.
P.S. the Reg. commentards some of them well versed in the more arcane methods of Linux scripting, have some very good solutions to keep rm -rf “$STEAMROOT/”* from becoming a rm -rf “/”*. and packman munching the whole drive/attached drives.
/ is not your home folder, ~
/ is not your home folder, ~ is your home folder.
/ is the root of the computer. Had you been running as root this would have been everything (and the computer would be in an unusable state). But as a user, this would be everything you had write permission to. (see chmod)
thanks for the info
thanks for the info