Hi

Feisty is causing me some troubles with an ext2 partition used to share files between different OS's (Mandriva, Ubuntu, Windows). The problem comes when trying to open a file created on one of the Linux distro using the other one. Seems not the same user is used. I've tried to add the uid=500 and uid=1000,gid=100 lines to /etc/fstab, but this causes the drive not to be mounted when Ubuntu starts up. Also, when those lines are present, no way to mount as normal user. The relevant line in /etc/fstab looks like this for now:
When trying to mount as:
I get:
Any suggestions how I can tell Ubuntu to use the same uid/gid like Mandriva? Dmesg | tail gives no usefull info.

With the ext2 partition mounted try running:

$ sudo chmod -R 777 /media/maxtor

That should give the world rwx permissions on every file in /media/maxtor. The important thing to remember is that the partition must be mounted when you change the permissions on the mount point for the new permissions to apply to any new files added to the partition. You may run into a problem on a different linux OS if it mounts the external drive on a different mount point name. In that case just repeat the procedure on the new OS:

$ sudo chmod -R 777 <mount point>

with the drive mounted.

Thanks for your answer. Actually, I wanted to know how I could change the behaviour for files that are added. Chmod changes permissions for files already present, but not for future files.

Not true. chmod on the mount point with the partition mounted changes the permissions on all subsequent files written to that partition. If you:

# chmod 777 /mount point

every subsequent file written to that partition will have 777 perms.

Knowing this fact, the course is clear. For each OS do "chmod 777 /mountpoint", then every OS will be writing to that partition with 777 permissions. Try it; it will work. The only thing that could complicate matters is an OS that automatically resets the perms on reboot for security reasons.

Note, the above is true for all linux filesystems but not for windows filesystems(vfat, ntfs).