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Until we get 1TB SSD’s for less than $1000, space on them is always at a premium. One strategy is to split your Steam game installs between drives. For slow loading or games you play often, you might want those on your SSD.  For infrequently played games, you likely want those on a big, cheap platter drive. Steam gives you the ability to have multiple libraries on multiple drives, but it doesn’t always work as expected.

I tried recently to add a library to a big platter drive, and got the message 'Failed to add new steam library to folder'. I tried all kinds of ways of creating the library, but always got the same message. My drive was not out of space, I had adequate permissions. I started/restarted steam. No luck.

The problem:
Failed to add new steam library to folder
The issue is that the Steam client cannot add new libraries while anything is happening to the existing game library.  In my case, one single game (way off the bottom of the screen!) was updating.  This activity prevents the Steam client from being able to add a new library folder.

The solution:
Pause or cancel the download/update. Make sure nothing is updating, then go to the Library display view in the Steam client. Then select: Steam->Settings->Steam Libraries Folders->Add Library Folder. You should then be able to select/create new library folders on new drives.

The shaming:
Valve engineers – fix that dialog! Be sure to tell people WHY you can’t create the folder, not just that you can’t. Error messages are useless unless they give you enough information about what’s wrong so that you can fix the problem. Especially one so simple to report.

I was just installing XAMPP on my windows 7 x64 box, I tried to start Apache and got this message:

Problem detected!
Port 443 in use by ""C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-hostd.exe" -u "C:\ProgramData\VMware\hostd\config.xml"" with PID 4688!
Apache WILL NOT start without the configured ports free!
You need to uninstall/disable/reconfigure the blocking application
or reconfigure Apache and the Control Panel to listen on a different port


Unfortunately, VMWare Workstation places it’s host ports on the same ones needed by Apache.  The solution is to change the apache ports via this procedure:

1. Open the XAMPP Control Panel
2. Click the ‘Config’ button next to the Apache module and select the ‘Apache (httpd-ssl.conf)‘ option
3. A text edit box will pop up with the contents of httpd-ssl.conf
4. Find the line with Listen 443
5. Change 443 to some other open port – like 4430
6. Do a search/replace in the file for all the references to 443 and change them to 4430 (should be like 3-4 of them)
7. save and exit the editor
8. Start Apache

If all goes well, it should start right up on ports 80, 4430.  Test it by going to localhost in your web browser and you should see the familiar xampp control panel

Update 2020-02-02:
Thanks to Spadez for this additional info:

I found I also had to set it via the Service and Port Settings in the Xampp Config. In the Xampp control panel click the Config button then the Port settings button and set the port number there.

Installing SteamOS natively was a real pain in the rear during the alpha.  You had to do a lot of fiddling to get it working, and it didn’t have very good hardware support.  The most successful virtual-machine installs were on VirtualBox at the time.  I managed to get that working but it required a lot of linux/unix experience.  Far beyond what most people would want.

Valve, however, just released SteamOS Beta last month.  I downloaded a copy and it’s much, MUCH easier to install.  That, and it seems to install ok in VMware (which has much better hardware support than VirtualBox).

There’s still some gotcha’s.  Upon trying to run Left4Dead2, I get errors about unsupported OpenGL extensions, but I am using VMware’s hardware drivers.  I still have some experimenting to do – maybe I can get it working properly.  But the BigPicture and all the other experience is there.

Here is the procedure (wrote this up around midnight – so forgive the typos.  I’ll clean it up later):

1. Download the SteamOS Beta iso from this link.  Valve has done a nice job here in already packaging it as a bootable iso file.  So no more needing to use 3rd party tools to create bootable iso files or boot off usb sticks after writing them via special programs.
2. Set up your VMware system using the following settings:
   1. Custom (advanced) setup
   2. Hardware compatibility: Workstation 10.0
   3. Select a guest operating system: Debian 7 64-bit
   4. Processors: 2 processors, 2 cores per processor (4 total)
   5. Memory: 4096MB
   6. Hard drive 500MB (40MB minimal)
3. Save your settings and close the VMware application.
4. Go to the file location where you created the virtual machine in Step 2
5. Open the .VMX file associated with it and add this line to the end:
   firmware = "efi"
6. Start VMware Workstation back up.
7. Set the virtual machine’s cdrom drive to point to the iso you downloaded in step 1.
8. Start up the virtual machine and you should get the steam installer started
9. Follow the procedure for the install as normal.  Nothing special needed.  It will reboot when finished.
10. Here’s where things might diverge.  If you have an nVidia card, odds are good you won’t have issues, but for those with ATI cards, you might.
11. Upon reboot after install, I got a delay then Debian started up in fallback mode.
12. Either way, complete the steam install by agreeing to the licensing terms.
13. You’ll see the steam platform update itself.  Log into Steam using your Steam account.
14. You should have a steam client up after logging in.
15. For those with ATI cards or the dreaded blank screens after reboot, do this step to install VMware tools BEFORE rebooting.
    1. Open a terminal prompt.
    2. Click on the ‘Install VMware tools’ option on the bottom of the VMware window, or select VM->Install VMware Tools option from the top menu.
    3. On the desktop, open the CD-ROM drive that appears and copy the VMwareTools-x.x.x-xxxxxxxx.tar.gz (x’s will be the latest version number).
    4. copy the tarball to /tmp via:
       cp VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar.gz /tmp
    5. log in as the ‘desktop’ user. SteamOS has two accounts: ‘steam’ and ‘desktop’. You need to be ‘desktop’ to issue any sudo commands.
       su - desktop
    6. The default password for the ‘desktop’ user is ‘desktop’.  You need to be logged in as desktop to have su privileges.
    7. cd /tmp
    8. gunzip VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar.gz
    9. tar -xvf VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar
    10. cd VMWareTools-x.x.x.xxxxx.tar (correction: cd vmware-tools-distrib)
    11. sudo ./vmware-install.pl -default
    12. Answer yes to the prompt and VMware tools will install.
    13. When it’s complete, reboot:
        sudo reboot
16. When your system reboots, you should be in SteamOS big-picture mode!  Log in and enjoy!

Helpful links:
Initial setup instructions for VMware with pictures
http://www.vmwareandme.com/2014/01/guide-installing-steamos-on-vmware.html#.UwMJVIW0x1G

VMware tools
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUK7Ycy2kzo

In a follow-up article from last year, here’s the link to the TWAIN drivers for your CanoScan scanner so that you can get it working with Photoshop CS4/CS5/CS6 on 64-bit Windows.

Again, please not this ONLY works with the 32-bit version of Adobe Photoshop CS4/CS5/CS6.  TWAIN support is not available on 64-bit versions of Photoshop.

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/twain-plug-photoshop-cs4-cs5.html#id_51241