It's not strange: it tryes to chmod 755, but since there is a single readonly flag and not one for each u, g and o, it fails, setting permissions to 777 (which is actually what he was trying to acheve)

What I thought was strange is: dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 32768 Oct 26 15:14 Music mp3 the output from ls -l /mnt/win lists the dir as no write access. As you point out, it is usual for a fat32 drive to be "777", hence my question about 3rd party utils.

I gotta learn to make myself more clear

Baldrick

If i remember well from msdos time, fat has 4 flags: hidden, system, readonly, and archive (that is, changed since last backup)

Most are ignored under linux (some under win as well), but readonly is mapped to the write permissions (i've been knowing this a whole half a day now )

Hi Alessandro,

a+w did it.

Once again many thanks for your help, you can go to bed early tonight .http://images.linuxquestions.org/que...ons/icon12.gif

I am probably pushing my luck, I thought this would be the easy part.

I right click on the music mp3 folder and select "make link" and I get an error
"Operation not permitted" while creating a link to "/mnt/win/music mp3"

Any suggestions ?

Once I had got the link I would have dragged it onto the "desk top"


Best wishes.


James.

You can't create links on a fat filesystem, it's not supported by kernel.

Note this is true for a native win system, too: mswin shortcuts are not at system level, they don't work trasparently on EVERY application: it's the application itself that cares about them.

As a curiosity, under linux you can add unix-like behavior to a fat filesystem mounting it as umsdos (unix-on-msdos), but it's terribly slow

Also note that even if you can't place a link ON a vfat, you can have a (soft) link pointing TO a vfat, like any other filesystem point.

Back to your problem, you can drag the folder to your desktop while holding ctrl+shift.
What i did on my own system is actually making a link in my ~ (/home/ale):
ln -s /mnt/data1/mp3 ~/mp3
Or you can do (from your home)
mkdir mp3
ln -s /mnt/win/Music\ mp3/* ~/mp3
This way, if you run out of space and move /mnt/win/Music\ mp3/Lennon to another disk, simply change the corresponding symlink and you'll still have it in ~/mp3/Lennon among others !

Links give linux a boost in flexibility, on home desktops awa on large university networks. Once you get familair with them you won't live without.
Refer to ln man page

Hi Alessandro,

Once again many thanks.

I hope you have a very good Christmas. (Chances are that I will be asking for more help shortly). I am going to try and load WINE so I can use a couple of Windows programs I really can't live without.

I will start a new topic.

Best wishes.


James.

Hey Foggy,

I'm glad I was able to help you. And also, thanks to the other guys, I've learned a lot from this thread.

I have Fedora Core 1 and I downloaded the rpm to install the kernel module to allow me to mount my ntfs drive but I couldn't get it to install properly. I haven't actually had enough time to try it though (exam week) but I'll get to it this weekend.

Someone mentioned: Why run WinXP still?
Well, to be honest, I love Linux so far (i like challenges and things that make me think) but Windows still has a nicer GUI (i can't get gdesklets to run properly either.. I think it's somethin with Fedora because I tried it on 2 different machines and I followed instructions and all but it doesn't work), but aside from that, I think Linux rocks. It is truly amazing :-) it never crashes! and there's no need to restart it after every install!


Thanks and best wishes to all,
Pandasonic


I love the penguin. But my heart stays with the Pandas.