I use Linux Mint 17, which comes with Evince Document Viewer 3.10.3

I store my documents on a NAS drive (mounted as NAShome), which uses the NFS protocol to share files with over the network.

My problem is this: When I view a PDF file in Evince Document Viewer and select File--->Save a copy..., then I get the following message:
The file could not be saved as “file:///home/steve/NAShome/docs/testfile.pdf”.
Error setting owner: Operation not permitted

When I look in the docs folder on the NAS, however, the file has been saved!

OK, so this is not stopping me from working. However, I would like to know what is going on to improve my knowledge of Linux software.

Any ideas?

Note This only happens for PDF files from Evince. (I can use LibreOffice to save ODT file copies to the NAS with no problem. I can also copy/paste PDF files from the Desktop to the NAS no problem.)

Yes, I get the same thing from Save a Copy when the target is a remote Samba mount, or even a local VFAT filesystem.

Evince is trying to set owner, group, and permissions on the copy it saves, The error message means it is unable to do so, either because the filesystem doesn't support that operation (VFAT has no support for owner/group), or because of a problem with the user or group identifiers (possible over the network).

It could be argued that Evince shouldn't do this, and just let the owner, group, and permissions pick up the defaults. As most programs do. But in this case, I assume the authors want "Save a copy" to mean the copy has the exact same attributes as the original. So it tries to make it that way, and the error message means it could not.

As you said, the file is saved anyway, it just doesn't have the same attributes as the original.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for taking the time and trouble to post a reply. I'm grateful for your explanation.

Just for completeness, my NAS file system is NTFS, which doesn't support Linux permissions as you say.

I have the following line in /etc/fstab:
There might be some way of entering uid, gid and umask values to match the Evince permissions but that's a problem to experiment with on a slow, rainy day. It's a bit beyond my current level of understanding.

Thanks again!