Hi everyone,
I wanted to make a guide for users who are trying to link their steam library from their computers to their steam deck through SMB. This guide will cover almost everything except for setting up an SMB share as there are a million and 1 ways to do that and I haven’t used more than a few.
Also, what is SMB? SMB or Samba is a way of connecting files on your network, think connecting a flash drive to your computer but instead your computers steam games to your steam deck wirelessly.
You may ask why would anyone want to do this???? The short and easy answer is that you can access the steam games downloaded on your computer without having to download them again to your Steam Deck, This might be useful to test games or in the smaller storage Deck’s case, it may be the only way to play some bigger games without deleting games from your library or not having enough room in general. You can use a local share to access your games instead of taking up a computer to stream the games from a dedicated computer.
Big shoutout to [Chinballs Gaming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etj2JLhFkQ0&ab_channel=ChinballsGaming) video where I adapted this from, and also the comment under his video from “Hannover Fist” that commented on how to get it to stick correctly after a reboot.
Some pre-cursors:
I: This guide is specific to Unraid but will cover a lot so you should be able to adapt it to your use cases.
II: I will try to go over everything that I can think of but if it’s not listed here please use google or ask in this thread after trying as I don’t want to have my post annoying the subreddit.
III: I have a background in IT and networking, I am new to Linux and do not know everything about it. Please head the warnings that I include to prevent bricking your Steam Deck and also…
IV: **I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR BRICKING YOUR STEAM DECK.** I will include steps and links on how to fix your steam deck in case it does get bricked but please be nice and I will gladly help anyone out as much as I can.
V: Games that have a native Linux port may try to update and fail leaving you unable to play said game. I am trying to find a fix to this issue but unfortunately, it can’t be fixed for now.
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With that out of the way let’s begin.
1: The first step is setting up your SMB share. There are tons of ways of doing this, the main thing is that you know the IP address of your share and that you know the share name, username, and password for the share.
For example, your share should be set up to be
>//192.168.1.123/MYShare/Deck/SteamLibrary
In this example, your network is in the 192.168.1 subnet (I’m not getting too fancy here but your guide should tell you how to find the address), and the share is listed as MYShare/Deck. This will vary but as long as you know what your info is then you can change it as needed however, make sure that you point to /SteamLibrary.
2: Now for the next part, we will be using desktop mode on the steam deck. This whole guide can be done without an external hub to use a mouse and keyboard however you may want to use one to save time and sanity.
Once in desktop mode, you can use a mouse or hold the steam button and use the right trackpad to navigate to the start button.
>Clicking the right trigger in acts as left-click and the left trigger acts as right-click, Steam + X brings up the on-screen keyboard which will move to top or bottom depending on the location of the cursor. Also you can use the keyboard with both thumbs by using the trackpads and clicking the triggers in to select the key on each thumb (decent fast when using this and you might not need a usb hub using this).
Navigate to Start menu>System>Konsole.
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3: Now that we are in in the konsole it is important that you do not mess with too many things and consider security. Type `passwd` this will prompt and ask you to input a password. You can set anything that you’d like but don’t put anything you won’t remember, for simplicity’s sake I’m using “passwd” as it’s easy to type with the touchscreen, but you may want to change that for security.
4: Now we will navigate to Dolphin file explorer which should be on the bottom bar as the blue folder icon(if not you can go to the start menu then find it in applications). This is similar to file explorer in windows and will be how we edit the configuration file of the Deck itself to allow for mounting our share. In dolphin navigate on the right side to rootfs>etc, then scoll down and look for a file named `fstab`.
**This is my disclaimer to you, be careful of what you do in this file. I bricked my Deck messing with this file and I will list why I did and how I fixed it but be warned.**
5: Open the Fstab file and make a new line at the bottom. Now using the location of your share enter it as
`//192.168.1.123//MYShare/Deck/SteamLibrary` `/home/deck/nas` cifs uid=1000,username=`NAME`,password=`PASSWORD`,nofail 0 0
6: Ok so that looks like a bunch of jargon but I will explain each part of that text and share insight of what issues you may run into
//192.168.1.123//MYShare/Deck/SteamLibrary change this to your share location on your network it may be different in all sorts of ways.
**ALSO IF YOU HAVE A SPACE IN YOUR SHARE NAME SUCH AS** `/MY SHARE/DECK` you will need to remove the space and enter `\040` so it will look like `/MY\040Share/Deck` (chaotic I know but this will brick your Deck if you don’t do this).
>`//192.168.1.123//MYShare/Deck/SteamLibrary` needs to be pointed at your steam library, you can add multiple lines to mount other things such as games etc but you need this one to be directly pointed at steam.
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>`/home/deck/nas` is where we are mounting the share at on the Deck itself, you can change this but stay in the /home/deck directory to prevent issues on rebooting.
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>cifs, is how we are mounting and thats a command in general so that will stay the same
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>uid=1000, is the decks userid, we have to set it or we cannot access the files correctly on steam.
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>username=`NAME`, will vary depending on how you setup your share. On windows this might be your actual account name but please consult your guide specifically.
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>password=`PASSWORD`, will also vary, personally I don’t recommend using main password as this is plain text and can be seen by anyone. Again consult your guide specific and you may not have the option to change the password.
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>”nofail” means that when youre not on your local network you deck will ignore that it cant mount the share and will boot, otherwise you will get the boot logo of death
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>0 0 is just a time out and means to not wait at all if not able to mount.
Please look at the attached screenshot and notice the colors of the text in the file [Screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/bZxwFsM)
the `//192.168.1.123//MYShare/Deck/SteamLibrary` should be White.
then `/home/deck/nas` should be Blue.
cifs should be purple
then uid=1000,username=`NAME`,password=`PASSWORD`,nofail should be blue again
lastly the 0 0 should be orange
**IF THIS IS NOT THE CASE DOUBLE CHECK EVERYTHING BECAUSE YOU WILL BRICK IF YOU SAVE AND REBOOT!!**
**If you brick your steam deck use this** [**Link**](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3) **to fix it.** Something to consider is that if you do not have a USB hub or flash drive that you can connect to your steam deck you can use a MicroSD card instead. Works just the same and if you have a problem seeing a hub or flash drive others have said to use the MicroSD card method to fix it also.
If everything matches then save (you will be asked for your password which you made in `passwd`, type that in) and you should be good to restart your Deck. Fingers crossed it mounts correctly. The way to check if it is mounted is to wait for boot, go back into desktop mode, then go into Dolphin file explorer>Remote and your share be should sitting there as `/home/deck/nas`.
7: **Now at this point this is where troubleshooting may be necessary.** You may see the share with an exclamation point and when trying to access it you may be given a permission denied error. If that’s the case as was mine we can run a command to see what the issue is.
Navigate back to the start menu>system>konsole
>type `sudo dmesg`
[What is dmesg?](https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-use-the-dmesg-command-on-linux/)
It will ask you for your Deck password which we set earlier with `passwd`, enter your password then you will be shown the logs that are made on starting your Deck. In this case, we are looking for any red text or bold text and bonus points if it says CIFS. There are a lot of errors that you may encounter and I will go over the ones that I encountered and prevented my Deck from working for me using UNRAID.
“**No dialect specified on mount**”. This pertains to the security of shares and SMB, in short SMB 1.0 is insecure and shouldn’t be used because of exploits. Windows 10 doesn’t allow SMB 1.0 and most things that host SMB shares nowadays should support SMB 3.0. Check with your guide specifically and google if necessary which version it supports. [Link to Dialects](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=254634)
>The fix for this is adding `vers=3.0` after nofail in your text file (if it supports 3.0), it should look like `//192.168.1.123//MYShare/Deck/SteamLibrary` /home/deck/nas cifs uid=1000,username=`NAME`,password=`PASSWORD`,nofail,`vers=3.0` 0 0
You may also run into a mounting error talking about how it couldn’t mount before boot. As of right now, I have fixed the issue with a command in konsole that tells the Deck to wait til until the network is connected to try and mount, I will update the guide later with the command and link to that fix. If you run into this error please reply with it so I can look it up and edit the solution.
“hardlinks will not be recognized on this mount” my understanding is that this isn’t a major error and can be safely ignored according to [**Chinballs Gaming**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etj2JLhFkQ0&ab_channel=ChinballsGaming) video. I haven’t had a specific problem and this message only clutters logs according to him but I will update the guide if issues come up from this.
>the fix for this is adding `noserverino` after no fail in your text file (can be combined with the `vers=3.0` fix if needed), it should look like
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>`//192.168.1.123//MYShare/Deck/SteamLibrary` /home/deck/nas cifs uid=1000,username=`NAME`,password=`PASSWORD`,nofail,`noserverino` 0 0
Any other errors I am not sure about, if you cannot find an answer on google by searching the error with Linux in the name you can post them down below and I will try to help as much can or others may be able to help also.
8: If you’ve gotten everything mounted correctly, first congratulations! Second, now comes the easy part. Open steam on the desktop mode, go to Steam in the top left>Setting>Downloads>Steam Library Folders. It will popup storage manager, navigate to the + and it’ll open add a new steam library folder. Your folder may auto-populate but I recommend opening the dropdown, clicking let me choose another location, add, and selecting home/deck/nas. Steam will popup an error talking about 2 libraries but it will be fine. It might freeze for a bit while it scans but should load up your share of games.
9: From this point, you can boot back into game mode and you should see your shares games under the installed folder.
Now for some caveats, your Deck may try to update games which is fine and they may update correctly but there is also a problem with games having a Linux version and the Deck trying to change over to that. As of this time, it won’t be able to change to that version and will get stuck updating said games. You will not be able to play those games on your deck as they won’t launch because of a pending update (I’m trying to find a way to fix it), so for now sorry.
10. Using this method you can also mount games other than steam games. Think ROMs of games that you own on your share. On my share, I have ps2 games so I mount the entire share in fstab and can allow emulators to see those ps2 games and play them from my share on the network.
Some final notes:
The reason for using this is to save space on the Deck, however, depending on your network setup you may not benefit from this at all. Let me give an example if you’re using a laptop over slow wifi to host the share your games may stutter along. This would be a limitation of your share and I recommend wiring your share to your network and being as close as possible to your wifi router when playing games from said share. If you have a dock that is capable of 1Gbps then that would be perfect, otherwise stick to wifi if your dock is only 100mbps (jsaux regular hub is and some amazon hubs) within reason of course, if your router is 2 rooms away a wired 100mbps connection might be better, play with it and see.
Some programs with emulators may require permissions to access files outside the deck such as SMB shares, if that’s the case and you’re having issues saving files or accessing saves use “Flatseal” from the discover store.
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Lastly, I am only a human, I have tried to do my best writing this and filling in everything I remember making this from my endeavors last week. If I missed anything please let me know and I will update this guide as fixes are found.
I don’t know if donations are allowed but $CoastalCustomTech on Cash App, donations aren’t expected but much appreciated as a thank you for the time and effort I put into this guide and fixing issues.
I started last week not knowing Linux and have become decently familiar with it so I will try my best to help others out!
WACOCA: People, Life, Style.