Thursday, January 10, 2013

Removing Unsupported Game Entries from Steam Beta

I’ve been playing around with steam beta for linux a bit this week and I am super excited to see this amazing project working so well in Ubuntu. After adding some games I purchased from the Indie Humble Bundle I noticed a little bug that I thought I would touch on. When you view your list of “Linux Games”, Steam will show games that are compatible with linux but unfortunately not all of them are officially supported yet. The easiest way to check if the installation will work is to click the install button and on the window that pops up, check if the disk space required information is visible. If it is blank, like the screenshot below, it will likely not install properly.


If you have accidently installed an unsupported game, steam will throw an “invalid app config“ error when you try to run it. To get rid of the application entry do the following. Make sure steam is closed then open a terminal and navigate to ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common .Then type the following:


  • rmdir {name of game}

in my case it was:

  • rmdir snapshot

This will remove the directory. Next navigate to ~/.local/share/Steam/config/ and type:

  • sudo nano config.vdf

This will bring up the text editor. Find the section called “apps” and locate the block that references the game you wish to remove. It will start with a number code followed by an open and closed curly brace. Check the “Installdir” section for clues to which entry is which. Write down the number code before continuing. Delete the entire entry, including the number code, the open and closed curly braces and everything in between them. In my case I deleted:

"204220"
{
    "installdir" "~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/common/snapshot"
    "HasAllLocalContent" "1"
    “UpToDate" "1"
}

Press ctrl+x to save and then navigate back to ~/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps/ Now type:

  • rm appmanifest_{number code}.acf

in my case it was:

  • rm appmanifest_204220.acf

Now start up steam and it will no longer think you have the game installed.

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