Trying to open Fat32 partition in NVU success

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday, 23 February 2006 16:56, Kevin Cole wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 10:36:04PM -0500, William Wereley wrote:
> > I found the partition listed under media. Strange place to me,
> > but I'm learning. An old dog but not unteachable. I have tried a
> > few ways to change the permissions so I can edit those files, NVU
> > can edit but not save. So sudo into nautilus and that doesn't
> > work. Went into Win2000 and set them as shares, no help. Hmmm
> > seems I need to do some terminal work.Anyone have any suggestions
> > I've poured through  google and the wiki, tried to sudo chmod 775
> > and nothing 777 nothing. I definately missing something and will
> > feel like a jerk when I discover how easy it probably is.
> > Anybody, please set on the right path.
> > Thanks
>
> Hey Bill,
>
> It has been a while since I've done this, but as I recall, you
> will want to add something in your /etc/fstab that forces the
> FAT32 partition to "have a user and group id".  Linux (among
> other OS's) assigns an user ID (UID) and group ID (GID) to
> each file.  The partitioning schemes are set up to accomodate
> that.  FAT32 offers no such fields, so they have to be sort
> of inferred.  In /etc/fstab you can tell it to map everything
> in a FAT32 partition to a single user and group.  The default
> first user id assigned in Ubuntu for regular users is 1000.
> Ditto for group id.  So, in the options area a "uid=1000,gid=1000"
> may help you out.

the rw and ro options simply tell the kernel to permit or not permit 
writes to the file system. Has nothing to do with specific 
permissions, that's the next step

uid and gid assign a specific owner and group to all files/dirs like 
Kevin says

umask sets the permissions applied to all those files and dirs - it 
works exactly like the umask command in the shell, indicating the 
permissions you DON'T want applied.

dmask and fmask are like umask but applied seperately to files and 
dirs. This is very useful as umask=0000 makes all files executable, 
which doesn't make sense on a vfat partition and you lose the feature 
of colorizing the output of ls according to file type.

Long ago I got fed up with mount defaults changing between versions, 
so now I prefer to explicitly set all relevant options and save 
myself later hassle.

On a single user machine you probably want rwxrwxrwx for directories 
and rw-rw-rw- for files (exactly what Windows gives you). This does 
it:

/dev/hda2  /mnt/vfat  vfat  rw,dmask=0000,fmask=0111         0 0

A more complex example, I need to share some vfat partitions between 
several users (and exclude others). I want the valid users to have rw 
permissions, and everyone else to have no permissions at all. The 
valid users all belong to group users (gid=100)

/dev/hda2 /mnt/vfat  vfat  rw,gid=100,dmask=2007,fmask=0117  0 0

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five