[DESKTOP] Certain mounted folders are invisible in certain applications - Chromium, Foobar2000

[Spectrum]

I have some NTFS partitions mounted as folders, e.g. one at /music (top level). This works fine in most applications, but to certain applications these NTFS folders are invisible. I don't get any error message; I simply don't see the folders at all when browsing for files and folders.

Applications that exhibit the problem include Chromium and the Foobar2000 music player.

Applications that work fine include Dolphin, Firefox and Clementine.

I also had this problem in Kubuntu 19.10, but never in 18.04.

My /etc/fstab contains this:

UUID=2D67F493580046AC  /music  ntfs-3g  defaults,windows_names,locale=en_US.utf8  0 0

My /etc/mtab contains this:

/dev/sda3 /music fuseblk rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096 0 0

Does anyone know what could be wrong? Thanks in advance!

[bradleypariah]

Sorry if this isn't helpful, but do you still use Windows?

I used to have some weird problems with this sort of stuff too. I had Windows dual booted with Kubuntu on my SSD, and I had two NTFS HDDs - one for media and one for games. I stopped using Windows entirely in 2018. My NTFS drive issues were bugging me, so not too long ago, I made backups of my media and games, and formatted both drives as ext4. All the issues went away.

If you're done using Windows on that machine, that would certainly be a way of ending your problem.

[jlittle]

NTFS has a proper "hidden" attribute, not the ancient kludge *nix derived file systems use with "dot files". Maybe those applications are respecting the hidden attribute?

[Spectrum]

Sorry if this isn't helpful, but do you still use Windows?

I still use Windows, yes.

I've experimented, and it turns out that apparently the NTFS mounts are not the problem. Chromium can't see any custom top-level folders. I added a folder /test which is empty. Chromium doesn't acknowledge that it exists.

My folders (/music and /test) look perfectly sane when I ll them (compared to /bin, /home and /proc, which are perfectly visible):

spectrum@spectrum-desktop:~$ ll /  
total 128
drwxr-xr-x  24 root root  4096 Apr 28 12:56 ./
...
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 Apr 26 14:11 home/
...
drwxrwxrwx   1 root root  8192 Apr 28 07:42 music/
...
dr-xr-xr-x 305 root root     0 Apr 28 12:31 proc/
...
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Apr 28 12:56 test/
...
spectrum@spectrum-desktop:~$ ls /test/ 
spectrum@spectrum-desktop:~$

Moreover: If I create a symbolic link to one of these "invisible" folders, then the file dialog in Chromium can see the symlink, but it doesn't understand it as a link. It just interprets it as a file. If I double-click on it, it doesn't go to the folder; it just selects the link itself.

Does anyone have a clue what is going on?

[Schwarzer Kater]

Are both Chromium and the Foobar2000 music player installed as snaps?

[Spectrum]

Are both Chromium and the Foobar2000 music player installed as snaps?

Ooooo! Yes, I believe they are.

[claydoh]

For snaps, by default have access to access to $HOME, /media/, /mnt/ so mounts outside of these areas they cannot access. if you put the mounts in the XDG standard places such as /media/username, or /mnt, they might show up.
You may have to adjust the permissions for the snap to add this support.

This of course depends on the nap creator which permiossions are set. leafpad, for example, has this set, for obvious reason. I think a web browser having access to places out of the norm may be a small safety consideration.

fwiw, flatpaks have similar sandboxing restiction options as well.

Luckily with the latest Discover, there is now the option to view and change snap 'connections'

[Spectrum]

For snaps, by default have access to [FONT=Arial][COLOR=#242729]access to $HOME, /media/, /mnt/ so mounts outside of these areas they cannot access. if you put the mounts in the XDG standard places such as /media/username, or /mnt, they might show up.
You may have to adjust the permissions for the snap to add this support.

This of course depends on the nap creator which permiossions are set. leafpad, for example, has this set, for obvious reason. I think a web browser having access to places out of the norm may be a small safety consideration.

fwiw, flatpaks have similar sandboxing restiction options as well.

Luckily with the latest Discover, there is now the option to view and change snap 'connections'

Thanks. But checking removable-media doesn't seem to help.