Hello all,

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.04 on a macbook santa rosa and was pleasantly surprised to find that my hfs+ partition mounted automatically. I was prompted to enter a username and password to access the partition in the file browser- the username and password I normally enter to log-on to OSX worked just fine.

Now I can read many files on the partition, but there are some locked folders. These include the standard user folders created by OSX (Documents, Pictures, Music, Desktop etc.). When I try to access them I get "The folder contents could not be displayed- you do not have permissions necessary to view the contents of 'Documents'". Here what the permissions look like of a folder I can't access.

drwx---r-x 1 501 dialout 13 2009-01-06 13:36 Desktop

How do I edit the permissions of these folders so that I can read them from Ubuntu? I'm not 501, so as far as I know I can't use chmod. My understanding is that I won't be able to WRITE to the OSX partition unless I turn off journaling on that partition, which I don't really want to do. I already tried logging into OSX and changing the permissions of these folders so that everyone can read, but that didn't work.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

in a terminal type sudo nautilus then enter then password and now you can see them but you can also hurt things be careful. When your running your file manager as root and root can delete anything. while your root you can change what ever you want. right click then properties and set it up for what ever you for access. in every linux OS there are help files and man files please read

I read. First I used " sudo chmod u+rw -R Documents " to add read and write permissions recursively through the Documents tree. chmod tried, but all files gave this error:

chmod: changing permissions of `Documents/Windows Applications/Trans2100.exe.app/Contents': Read-only file system

So chmod was able to see the files long enough to try to change their permissions, but the permissions didn't actually change. The permissions still are:
drwx---r-x 1 501 dialout 13 2009-01-06 13:36 Desktop

So users should be able to read... but I can't.


Then I tried to edit the permissions of the folder using the gui (gksudo nautilus, then navigated to the folder, right click to preferences to edit permissions). I was unable to change the owner or group (would get error of "Sorry, couldn't change the permissions of "Documents": Error setting permissions: Read-only file system". I could change the file-access, but the changes wouldn't stick.

So, while I can access the embedded files will running nautalus as root (a risky behavior I want to avoid doing regularly) I can't change the permissions so that I will be able to read while not running as root.

Are there other options for me? I would like to access this drive regularly without the root trick.

as root in properties set it up so only things can be seen and not deleted. and who can see it etc etc etc.