[YLUG] Kunbunto

[Steven Ayre]

>
> The Win XP filesystem is FAT32, so that the NTFS issue isn't one that I 
> need to worry about.
>   
That makes things easier - write support for NTFS is still 
'experimental', because Microsoft won't release the details of how the 
journalling works. Reading isn't a problem though.
> I do however need to get to the bottom of this root access thing !  
> Which is, by the way, the reason that files cannot be dropped into the 
> Win XP partition.  In fact whilst I can understand the reasoning behind 
> Canonical doing this, it makes a gradual transition from Wins to Linux 
> very difficult !   If a newby can't get at and change their existing 
> files from Linux, and put them back, then they are dissuaded from using 
> Linux right from the start !!  This is is not what the Linux community 
> want !!!!
It sounds like a permissions problem. If you do ls -l on the directory 
it's mounted in, what permissions do you get.

I'm guessing you'll see it's owned by root & the root group and everyone 
else only has read access.

If that's the case you can change the mount options you're mounting the 
partition with, specifically the 'uid', 'gid' and 'mode' options. You 
can set them permanently in the /etc/fstab file.
Either set mode to 777 (bad on a server since it's world 
readable&writable, but probably fine for most workstations) or something 
like 775 and the uid and gid to match those of the user you're logged in 
as. It sounds like they might be defaulting to 0, which is the root 
user, and the default mode only giving read access to everyone else.
'ls -l' should show you what permissions it's being mounted with.
It's probably also checking it has the rw option, not ro, but if root 
can already write to it that's probably not the case.

-Steve