solved, thanks to Javier- changing permissions on USB drive

[javierrivera]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

I have looked at the fstab.

Now I'm puzled. I believe that you can't read it. But from your wording now seems like you can't write to it.

Anyway, mounted as ntfs, you are not going to be able to write to it. You'll need to mount it as ntfs-3g.

And usually external devices don't get fstab lines. But I'm not sure about a NTFS one as I don't use them.

Javier.

[javierrivera]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

I did update to install pmount but I have no idea how to use it.

pmount is how kubuntu mounts external devices. It works quite similar to mount:

$ pmount /dev/sda3

It can mount external devices as user, not as root.

Javier.

[duck!]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

Well, for sure I can use an external devices on Feisty .

I mean, this looks like a particular problem with your config, not a general problem. So Dell will have no more problem than with windows, at least I have seen windows xp machines unable to open pendrives.

And it's probably not a permission problem at all.

Anyway. Can you give some info, to check if we can troubleshot the problem?.

How is this external device formated? (NTFS,FAT,etc..)
How exactly do you mount it? (KDE windows, manual, wich command)
Is it defined on your fstab?
How you tried to pmount it, instead of mounting*?
Can you give us the output of the mount command with the device attached?
And fdisk -l?
Anything on dmesg?

You seen quite linux-savy, but maybe you are looking at the problem with the wrong angle. You are looking for file permission problems, couldn't it be caused by some problem in mounting?.

Javier.

I used to be Linux savy but it's been a long time. I included fstab in a post above. There may be a mounting problem but.... I can read the content of the drive.... just not write to it. Although fstab says rw, the properties under konqueror shows not writeable.

[javierrivera]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

Change that ntfs line for ntfs-3g in the fstab.

/dev/sdb1 /media/pockey ntfs uid=1000,gid=1000,auto,rw,users 0 0

There are two ntfs drivers now. One is "ntfs", the official one from the kernel, read-only. The other is "ntfs-3g" a new one with write support. You can only write to partitions mounted as ntfs-3g.

Note that ntfs-3g is quite new, be careful.

Javier.

[duck!]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

Yes, I see that the ntfs windows partition on my machine shows in fstab as ntfs-3g. So can I edit the fstab to change the pockey from ntfs to ntfs-3g?

[javierrivera]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

Yes, I see that the ntfs windows partition on my machine shows in fstab as ntfs-3g. So can I edit the fstab to change the pockey from ntfs to ntfs-3g?

Yes. Just use konqueror to browse to /etc, right click on fstab and choose "Edit as root".

Javier.

[duck!]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

Ok, I edited fstab to change format type from nfts to ntfs-3g and now the system settings/advanced/disk and filesystems sees the drive as a new one. The filetype is shown as auto. I could choose ntfs, which I did last time, but there is no choice for ntfs-3g. I could also choose usbdevfs or usbfs. Should I leave it as auto or choose one of the other formats?

[javierrivera]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

I don't know. I'm not very familiar with the GUI way of managing filesystems .

I'd probably look how is it in your windows partition and copy it.

Sorry .

Javier.

[duck!]

Re: changing permissions on USB drive

Wow. I left it as auto. It automounted and is now writable. I copied files onto the drive and it works fine. Wow!

Thanks again Javier. I guess I just needed someone to hold my hand through some new stuff.

[SheeEttin]

Re: solved, thanks to Javier- changing permissions on USB drive

Usual method to find out how something works is to read the man page, in this case, "man pmount". If it uses the --help argument (which most things do), you can use that too.

In short, it's just "pmount /dev/[device]". A mount point may be specified as the second argument if necessary.