Hi,

I've just installed Slackware 11.0 and my problem is that i cannot make symbolic links. The scenario is like this:
I installed Slackware 11.0, installed Gnome and some other progs and because i have other pc's running Windows, one of the disks is fat. In /etc/fstab this hard disk entry is:

/dev/hda2 /mnt/fat16 vfat noauto,owner,users,umask=000 0 0

so that everyone is able to rw to that disk. The problem is that i cannot make a symbolic link from that folder (vfat) to my Desktop (ext3). The message when i try to make the symbolic link is:

command: ln -s epipleon.odt test
reply: ln: creating symbolic link `test' to `epipleon.odt': Operation not permitted

If i go to the /mnt folder and ls within, i get:

drwxrwxrwx 16 adioniso users 16384 1970-01-01 02:00 fat16/

so i guess all permissions are ok. What else could be wrong? As user i can mount/umount this partition without problems.

Thanks in advance,
Argi

A symbolic link is a special kind of entry in a filesystem table, and so the table needs to support the features to do this. vfat can't handle the data, just like it can't handle posix permissions (rwxr-xr-w) etc... there's just nowhere for that data to go.

So, the only way to make that link is either to copy the file to an ext3 disk and create the link, or copy the file to my Desktop, correct?

Thanks!

sounds like it. you can symlink to somtehgin on the vfat, as the destination plays no part in the link itself, but you can't come from it.