Setting permissions on fat32 mount points 1

[wmg]

Greetings,

I'm trying to get WINE working reliably on my MDK9.1 installation. I use linux day-to-day but have a win98 partition for watching DVD's via tvout and for the kids windows games etc.

On installing wine, it said it wanted to search for an available windows installation. I was surprised to note that it didn't find it on /mnt/win which is where that drive (/dev/hda3) is mounted.

I changed the configuration of the fat32 partition so that the 'user' option was used and this meant that I had read access to the drive - and WINE found the installation.

Great! I installed a windows program in root mode (so the files could be written to etc). Only problem now is that whenever I try to run something (as a normal user), the files installed onto that drive cannot be executed as I don't have the 'x' permission.

I tried to change this using chmod but it says 'operation is not permitted'.

I mucked around a bit and all the evidence seemed to suggest that I cannot set linux permissions on the fat32 partition. Is that correct? Am I missing something else?

More importantly, can anyone help??

regards
wmg We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. [Robert Wilensky, 1997]

 

[Morsing]

Yes, FAT doesn't support filepermissions. There is a mount option to set this, look a 'man mount' I think.

Cheers Henrik Morsing
Certified AIX 4.3 Systems Administration
& p690 Technical Support

 

[ppc386]

I don't think it matters if the "x" bit of a windows program is set,
because the kernel is executing wine, and wine is running the program.

More likely, your program is trying to modify a file on your /win/
partition that it doesn't have permission to write.
( Maybe a temp file or *.INI file )

 

[wmg]

Thanks for the responses guys!

Henrik: I checked the man page for the mount command but couldn't really find anything relating to permissions. Does anybody have any more information about that one?

ppc386: That's a good point about the apps being executed by wine. Unfortunately, I can't even set write permissions as yet but, once [if] I can, I'll be sure to not set x permissions just to make sure. I'd prefer that configuration as it would be a little safer security wise.

Thanks again guys! We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. [Robert Wilensky, 1997]

 

[danielhozac]

I've found that setting permissions on FAT partitions is useless, as the permissions are forgotten 3 seconds after you set them. Unless you use a file system that has support for permissions and such, there is no way to use permissions on it, except with the [tt]mode=xxxx[/tt] parameter to the [tt]mount[/tt] command, as Morsing described. //Daniel

 

[flugh]

I dug through 'man mount'. Found this:

       uid=value and gid=value
              Set the owner and group of all files. (Default: the uid and  gid
              of the current process.)

       umask=value
              Set  the  umask  (the  bitmask  of  the permissions that are not
              present). The default is the umask of the current process.   The
              value is given in octal.

First, I'd create a group, say 'winers' or similar. Then I'd:
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/win -o umask=022,gid=<GID OF 'winers' GROUP HERE>

The special group for wine users is paranoia for me. Having once accidentally done an 'rm -rf *' in my /mnt/win/windows dir, I learned the hard way to use the 'least privileges' approach to filesystems ;-) (so you can leave the gid part out if you want). --
JR

 

[wmg]

Thanks all for your responses - I'll be sure to try it tonight!

;-) We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. [Robert Wilensky, 1997]