Copying .PlayOnLinux to other computer

booman

booman

Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming
Staff member
I have 6 computers in LAN for gaming. Every single PC has Mint 18 installed and the base setup:
  • Same Updates
  • Same Username
  • PlayOnLinux
  • Steam
  • 32-bit Libraries
  • Chrome
My goal is to install and configure all of my PlayOnLinux games on one machine and then just copy/paste the .PlayOnLinux folder to the other machines. This should eliminate the need to re-install all the game 6 times.

In fact, this should make it possible to migrate the Wine versions, resources (Components/Packages), shortcuts and wineprefixes all in one copy/paste.

Last weekend I copied the .PlayOnLinux directory from machine 1 to all the rest of the machines, but I'm getting some errors when launching the games. I'm getting Wine mismatch errors and strange "can't find executable" in a strange path like this:
Can't find L "unix/home/booman//.PlayOnLinux//wineprefix//battlefield2//drive_c/Program Files//EA Games//Battlefield 2//BF2.exe"
Click to expand...
This is from memory, but what is with the "unix" and the double slashes?

I have a work-around, which is to move the drive_c and registry files to a temp folder, created the wineprefix again and move them back. I would have to do this 5 times for every game on all 5 PC's... so not exactly making it easy, but its quicker than installing the games from scratch again.

I also noticed some of the folder permissions were messed up. For example: Some of the folder groups showed: nogroup

So I used Terminal and ran this command:
Code: 
sudo chown :booman -R

That seemed to work with permissions and applying them recursively. Is there a better way to ensure the .PlayOnLinux child permissions are inherited correctly?

Any suggestions?
 
Over the network with SMB, I shared .PlayOnLinux on PC 1, then navigated to it with Nemo using SMB and copy/paste.
It works great with Steam and the common folder.
ex: smb://10.0.0.5
 
I was just thinking that if you were copying over by using a USB drive, then that could be the cause of permissions being wrong. Most USB drives come with FAT32 by default, which do not support file owner:group.

SMB (Samba) network sharing should preserve ownership, at least whenever I have used it.

I have personally not copied the entire .PlayOnLinux directory in its entirety before. There are a lot of symbolic links used, for example the contents of the dosdrives directory for each prefix. It could be that your file manager does not properly preserve these symbolic links when copying. I suggest you have a look at this directory to begin troubleshooting. Check the link destination on your source, then copy over the files and then check if the symbolic link is preserved properly.
 
Correct, the copy/paste will error about symbolic links so I skip them. Most of them go to Documents, Pictures, Music, etc. Nothing really necessary for my games.
There is a chance that one of the links affects Wine, but its hard to tell.
Maybe I should sit and check every single error. Or, maybe I should remove all symbolic links that I don't need?
Is there a better way to migrate all of my games?

Maybe I should just copy/paste wineprefixes only and then select a Wine version and manually create the shortcut myself...
 
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