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{How To] Share between Linux & Windows

One install for both Linux & Windows 7

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apaseall Tuesday 19 November 2013 at 0:15
apaseallAnonymous

Hi,
After finally getting World Of Tanks up and running under LinuxMint14 Cinnamon I want to try something dareing :)

My belief is that the actuall install of World Of Tanks [any game] is in reality a windows install in a Linux directory.
Or in other words the linux folder /home/[user]/PlayOnLinux's virtual drives/WorldOfTanks/drive_c/Games/World_of_Tanks contains exactly the same files as the windows [7] folder c:\Games\World Of Tanks.

If I am right then I believe this should be possible;
Have a ntfs partition that is shared between linux and windows on a dual boot pc.
Install World of Tanks [any game] from windows to the ntfs partition.
Install World of Tanks [any game] from linux by using PlayOnLinux.

Use a link [symbolic ?] to point /home/[user]/PlayOnLinux's virtual drives/WorldOfTanks/drive_c/Games/World_of_Tanks to the contents of the World of Tanks folder.

You may ask why I would want to do this.
The answer is simple. In World of Tanks there are a number of mod files that make the game much more enjoyable to play.
Instead of having to sync by hand the 2 game installations, a common location of files would mean doing it just once.
Plus because World of Tanks is a windows game, all the 3rd party development produces windows applications that are almost NEEDED to manage none vanilla World of Tanks installs.

This is not about using hacks or cheats, it is about managing the thousands of files that are not part of the vanilla install of World of Tanks.

So ... Is my idea possible ?
booman Friday 22 November 2013 at 0:20
booman

Hmm it should work, but will take some trial-n-error.
Yes, both installations are Windows files and should be identical... besides your mods of course.

Is your Windows and Linux dual-booting from one hard drive or separate hard drives?

Sounds like what you want to do is update one World of Tanks game files in Windows, but play in PlayOnLinux from the same install without having to update again.

You could always copy all of the game files to your Linux WoT folder instead of sharing...

You should be able to access your other available Windows drives and partition through Mint 14. I do it all of the time.

But its a lot harder to keep it mounted after you shutdown. To do this you need to perform some Terminal comands...
This requires mounting the drive adding information in your fstab file.

Once it mounts every time you launch Mint 14, then you can create links to the game folders.
You should be able to just create a new virtual drive and then a shortcut to the game folders. Make sure to install the necessary libaries in PlayOnLinux just as you would if installing the game.

I'm not sure if Windows file system encryption or permission will have problems?

Great idea by the way!

† Booman †
Mint 21 64-bit | Nvidia 515| GeForce GTX 1650
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