Strange Ubuntu/Vista Compatibility Bug, Solved

Walter Vos writes "Since I've been running Vista and Ubuntu in dual boot with a shared FAT32 partition for my personal folders, I've been seeing some strange compatibility issues between these two operating systems. Somehow Vista locks the folders on the FAT32 partition that are used for folders like Documents, Downloads, etc. A blogpost I wrote gives a detailed description of the problem and a fix for it."

Comments

FAT32

[Enderandrew]

NTFS-3G works pretty well. I'm not sure FAT32 is really necessary any more.

Re:FAT32

[duckInferno]

Stay away from FATMAN239. It nuked my hard drive.

Re:FAT32

[4D6963]

ntfs-3g worked pretty well for me, except for I/O intensive applications. aMule with all its I/O on a NTFS partition of VMware with all the virtual machine's file on a NTFS partition as well were pretty slow. Actually I think VMware was so slow that 99% of the CPU was actually taken up by ntfs-3g, meaning VMware was crawling.

Re:FAT32

[niteice]

There's a couple of ext3 drivers for Windows (one open-source, one not) that also work pretty well, so you can go both ways.

Re:FAT32

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know they're only ext2 drivers. Of coarse, you can usually mount ext3 as ext2 without any issues.

Re:FAT32

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know they're only ext2 drivers. Of coarse, you can usually mount ext3 as ext2 without any issues.

What keeps people from implementing ext3 support for Windows? The Linux source code is obviously available, so are Windows ext2 drivers reimplementations that aren't using existing code? Or is there some deeper problem?

Re:FAT32

[CheshireFerk-o]

http://www.diskinternals.com/ they have a freeware ext2/ext3 proggy called 'linux reader' ive had it installed for quite a few months. plays my ext3 mp3storage in winamp just fine.

Re:FAT32

[MindlessAutomata]

I kept all my mp3s on an NTFS partition, and it made amarok incredibly slow for searching through files and even listing them when I wanted to expand a tree. It, of course, also was using up a ton of cpu power. Other intensive programs were causing me other problems, mostly more cpu usage quirks.

NTFS-3g is not perfect and I'd recommend steering clear of relying on NTFS on linux for heavy or day-today usage. I haven't used ubuntu on windows but I can imagine it would give a negative impression due to performance issues. For pulling off the occasion file off another partition, though, it works well.

When I moved all my mp3s to an ext3 partition, all the problems with amarok went away instantly.

Re:FAT32

[Ruie]

I think he would have the same problem with a ntfs drive.

The issue is that his Linux user setup and Windows user setup are different.
So when he mounts the partition all files are owned by root (as shown on the screen), and some files have public permissions turned off - a reasonable thing.

Thus what he needs to do is specify the owner of the files using uid=value
option in /etc/fstab (uid value can be found via "getent passwd", it is numeric).

For more info read "man mount" carefully.

Re:FAT32

[kiddygrinder]

ext2 works pretty well for ext3 drives so they don't care enough to do it. Anyone who does care about ext3 that much i'd guess probably doesn't care that much about windows.

Re:FAT32

[Anonymous Coward]

I run one and I'm quite happy with it, with one provisio - if your system (when in linux mode) suffers a hard-shutdown, the windows driver won't be able to read the drive until you've booted into linux and run fsck on the partition.

Re:FAT32

[coolsnowmen]

I kept all my mp3s on an NTFS partition, and it made amarok incredibly slow for searching through files and even listing them when I wanted to expand a tree. It, of course, also was using up a ton of cpu power. Other intensive programs were causing me other problems, mostly more cpu usage quirks.

I found the default database backend slow, so switching to a better DB could be the solution. Even if your files are on NTFS, try having a postgres DB backend(on your fs of choice) and it should speed up your library searching.

Re:FAT32

[MindlessAutomata]

I thought of messing with that stuff but was too lazy to do it.

Re:FAT32

[macshit]

NTFS-3G works pretty well. I'm not sure FAT32 is really necessary any more.

FAT may suck, but it's the only thing understood by a lot of embedded software like BIOSes, device firmware, etc...

Indeed, for that reason it seems like FAT may very well be more useful than NTFS. FAT will probably stay around for quite a while as a "braindead, but simple and widespread" exchange format, but the only excuse for NTFS is windows.

Re:FAT32

[Daengbo]

Oddly enough, there's the exact corollary in Linux. Mounting NTFS filesystems often fails because they weren't unmounted properly in Windows. The solution is ... to boot into Windows and mount the filesystem.

Re:FAT32

[phantomfive]

Wow, google is good. I just did a search to find out exactly what fatman239 is, and the only thing that came up in the results was your post.

Re:FAT32

[FlyByPC]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_man

Re:FAT32

[Bert64]

Except that FAT craps out with large files, and things like dvd images are becoming increasingly common these days.
Having a new universally supported FS would be good for everyone, but Microsoft will never support a third party fs unless absolutely forced to, and anything they make themselves will be closed and proprietary and thus useless as a universal transfer system.

On the other hand, UFS is good, Linux, OSX, Solaris and BSD all support it out of the box (tho admittedly linux's support is quite poor).

Re:FAT32

[Mattsson]

I've had NTFS-G3 totally destroy two NTFS partitions with the Vista version of NTFS 3.1
This seem to differ a bit from the XP version of NTFS 3.1

Re:FAT32

[Ant P.]

Why bother keeping FAT around? UDF is better in every way, and it's even more widespread.

Re:FAT32

[ThePhilips]

IO is always slow. But there are some tricks to make it faster. But most of the performance tricks lose their advantages with FUSE (e.g. mmap'ed IO or direct IO or raw io, whatever sales call it today). VMware uses bunch of the tricks to actually speed up it's IO and it really works well with normal in-kernel file systems. But not with FUSE.

Re:FAT32

[AmonTheMetalhead]

Nope, FAT lacks the "owner" principle, the issue here is the 'System' bit. These are the file attributes FAT knows: - Read - Write - System

Re:FAT32

[szaka]

But most of the performance tricks lose their advantages with FUSE

Why? Current results show that a FUSE file system can be even faster than kernel file systems, e.g. ext3:

Some write speeds from http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Porting-Zfs-features-to-ext2-3-p18722897.html

tmpfs: 975 MB/sec
ntfs-3g: 889 MB/sec (note, this FUSE driver is not optimized yet)
ext3: 675 MB/sec

Re:FAT32

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Tongue of the Fatman (http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/tongue-of-the-fatman). That was when fighting games were original...

Re:FAT32

[RupW]

These are the file attributes FAT knows:
- Read
- Write
- System

No, it's

• r - read only
• a - archive (set when the file is modified, i.e. can use as a simple 'needs backup' flag)
• s - system
• h - hidden

Re:FAT32

[Ruie]

Nope, FAT lacks the "owner" principle, the issue here is the 'System' bit.

These are the file attributes FAT knows:
- Read
- Write
- System

Yes, but when you mount FAT in Linux the files are assigned an owner - which is is either specified via options or, in their absence, is the user running mount.

Re:FAT32

[geminidomino]

Note: Doesn't handle LVM volumes.

*grumble*

Re:FAT32

[jeebusroxors]

Should have used cuil.

(The above was a joke)

Re:FAT32

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

which is fine of course, unless you are trying to use Linux to rescue data from a corrupted Windows install/damaged FAT.

Re:FAT32

[Daengbo]

Except that I'm talking about NTFS and you're talking about FAT. The FAT tools in Linux are mature and complete.

Or am I missing a joke?

Re:FAT32

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately with more recent ext2 utilities some default parameter (I think it was inode size?) has changed and it makes Ext2IFS not work anymore. I've mailed the author and an upcoming release will support it, but it's been a while now and I wonder if anyone knows what alternatives there are to Ext2IFS that might be able to handle this.

Re:FAT32

[Aphoxema]

My ancient Pismo Powerbook running OS X seemed like it would be much more useful if I installed NTFS-3G on it so I could use my external (NTFS) hard drive and watch movies and play music, because it certainly has the power to decode the video.

The only problem was, after I started using it everything really slowed down, it was taking half of my processor just to access file on the hard drive.

I guess my only real option is to find an old firewire hard drive I can format in HFS.

Re:FAT32

[kusanagi374]

My experience with it says otherwise. I've had various issues with NTFS-3G when reading the hard disk on Windows. They are as follows:

1) For some reason, when a linux app tries to save a file with a question mark ("?"), which is an INVALID character on Windows, NTFS-3G will allow it to continue. You can perfectly read the file on linux (and write back to it), but Windows complains.

2) When using characters that have accents on them (like you see in romance languages - portuguese being my case), copying files back and forth is the same as begging to lose data. I've backed up my /home partition to an NTFS external HD only to find out a few days later that my Music and Videos folders had vanished. Other characters that I've had trouble with are the ones used to represent ordinal numbers in portuguese (which curiously won't show up correctly on slashdot).

In all of those cases, the partition works perfectly until you run CHKDSK, or write something to it under Windows. That pretty much undermines the main reason behind using NTFS-3G (writing to the same partition on both systems).

All in all, my opinion is either stick to Linux and EXT3 or Windows and NTFS. If you must use both, use different computers and get 'em exchanging data through SMB.

Disclaimer: I haven't researched for fixes (basically because when I found out about the issues it was too late and it didn't matter anymore) or tried to isolate the causes. What I've been using is the NTFS-3G driver supplied with Ubuntu (7.04 onwards).

Re:FAT32

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The only thing that comes up is your post and his post. Maybe if people would stop mentioning fatman239, it wouldn't be so damn popular!

Re:FAT32

[Monsuco]

NTFS-3G works pretty well. I'm not sure FAT32 is really necessary any more.

NTFS-3G is good for Linux reading Windows partitions, but you can have it the other way too. Windows can be set to read and write to Ext2/3 file systems. I imagine ext4 will work with this too when it comes out.

Re:FAT32

[Enderandrew]

NTFS-3G volumes won't mount automatically if they were not unmounted cleanly before, however you can force the mount regardless. I believe you just need to use the --force switch.

Re:FAT32

[Enderandrew]

That depends. A normal ext4 partition can be mounted as an ext2 partition and read in Windows, like ext3 and ext2 partitions with the right software. However, if you mount an ext4 partition with extents support, then it can no longer be mounted as an ext2 partition, and then can't be read in Windows.

Re:FAT32

[szaka]

For some reason, when a linux app tries to save a file with a question mark ("?"), which is an INVALID character on Windows

No it's NOT invalid. See exlanation at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#posixfilenames2

When using characters that have accents on them ... lose data

Explained at http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#locale

In all of those cases, the partition works perfectly until you run CHKDSK

Chkdsk never modifies these characters because they are valid (NTFS uses unvalidated UTF16LE).

Re:FAT32

[Daengbo]

This can cause data loss, can't it?

Re:FAT32

[Enderandrew]

No different that Windows mounting the drive again without doing chkdsk first. If you want to check for any data loss, you boot into Windows and run the chkdsk, and then shut Windows down cleanly. Then you don't need the --force command.

However, chkdsk isn't likely to help you much. NTFS isn't journaled and such. If there was data that didn't get written properly due to a dirty shutdown, at best then chkdsk will create lost files that likely won't help you much.

And the only lost potential data would be files being written when you shut down your box improperly. As a rule of thumb, I try not to hit the power button when saving crucial files.

Re:FAT32

[Anonymous Coward]

No, NTFS still has a File Allocation Table (FAT)

Re:FAT32

[AmonTheMetalhead]

Crap, you're right, my bad

Re:FAT32

[the_B0fh]

Oh, come on, you don't want to leave the Microsoft dominated world do you? Come and use FATX please...

Re:FAT32

[ThePhilips]

And where are the latencies?

And how well safety of data are ensured??

Throughput alone is meaningless to real world.

Layers, FUSE has to add, send latencies high and reliability down. I wouldn't trust my data to it. Though as nice workaround I gladly use it ;)

And in case of VMware, raw i/o is actually used as a way to improve latencies and memory consumption by bypassing OS file cache. Guest OSs normally have their own caches anyway.

Re:FAT32

[fredma123]

NTFS-3G does work fairly well for me. I mean, it is easier than FAT32 because FAT32 is sloppier with fragmentation and doesn't support permissions, so you have to use umsdos. My brother submitted a patch for uvfat a few years ago back when we were using 2.4 kernel and it worked, but i guess it just wasn't good enough for mainstream. The only beef I have with ntfstools for linux is ntfsdefrag isn't implemented yet. But I think that's due to the fact that there aren't really any defragmentation tools for linux. I mean, I came across a python prgoram for ext2/ext3 defrag, but there aren't any ones in e2fsprogs.

Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually cannot suck dick. That's my main issue with it. I downloaded and installed Ubuntu with the full expectation of some dick sucking and it never came to pass. What the fuck is that about? You, sir, are a liar and a fraud.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[teh moges]

Ubuntu can easily handle a FAT16, but has trouble handling a FAT32. It needs more practice I suppose.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least it doesn't fuck you in the ass like Vista does.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

TinyLimp Vista has never done that for me.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista fucks you in the ass, and Ubuntu fails to suck your dick...

Good thing I stick to good ol' DOS, the only OS that won't sexually abuse you, it seems.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Ubuntu is designed to rape pussies.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[hviezda14]

not sucking your dick means sexual abuse? (O_o)

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Alsee]

I've gotten used to putting up with all sorts of nasty behavior from Windows over the years, and I guess I could eventually reluctantly learn to get used to the ass fucking.... but I had to dump Vista when it insisted on shitting in my mouth after each ass fucking.

-

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[geminidomino]

No, Ubuntu is designed to rape pussies.

No, that's Slackware. ;)

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Bozzio]

You made me laugh out loud in my office and now my coworkers are wondering what's so funny.
What the hell am I supposed to tell them? I find poo humour funny???

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

not sucking your dick means sexual abuse? (O_o)

HELL, YES!!!!

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[scotsghost]

utterly depends on what you want. it's abuse (or a bug, or possibly simple orneryness) if you want Ubuntu to suck your dick and it doesn't. it's like Slackware's obvious sadism in refusing to suck your dick -- it's not abuse if that's your thing.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Random Guru 42]

Where do you work? That might be understandable...

Damn

[MichaelSmith]

For a moment there I thought somebody had fixed Ubuntu bug one.

crappy site

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if your crappy site actually rendered properly in browsers like... say... konqueror, we might give a damn...

Back to vista for you, for shame.

you are hollow,

[rvJJax]

you cannot life in two world, because if you do, i will destroy you.

BANKAI!

for the sake of topic: dual boot is lame.

Re:you are hollow,

[Psychotria]

I am wondering why dual boot is "lame"... I dual boot for a couple of reasons. A) For games; B) For Windows apps that I need for work (although, I avoid this now by having XP in vmWare); C) For cross-platform debugging/test (again, vmWare to the rescue); and D) my microscope software, which, alas I can't get to find the scope using vmWare... I have no idea why.

I have 3 machines at home plus my laptop. And I still dual boot on my main machine. Living life in two worlds aint that bad.

Re:you are hollow,

[grantek]

It's lame because games should work under linux. It's not necessarily you being lame, it's either game developers being lame by not porting their games, Windows being lame that it's hard for the Wine crew to implement it with the exactness needed for games, or both, if the lame games are using bits of Windows that are lame when stuff like OpenGL could help.

It's lame that people feel like they're being held hostage by an operating system that they don't otherwise want, and it's lame that MS is making money off that. If you actually want Windows for one reason or another, then it's not lame at all.

Re:you are hollow,

[rvJJax]

because this is /. ? hellooo ... is this still a /. ?

anyway, there is nothing wrong with that, it's just, hmmm i have seen many people doing that. and most of them is -you know-, using GNU/Linux to look cool "hey i'am hacker-wannabe, look at me with the cube". and yeah most of them use not-legal-aka-pirate Windows, and other .exe software.

so, since you are hollow too, i will release your soul. BANKAI!

Re:you are hollow,

[dosius]

And of course when Linux is finally desktop-ready they'll see it as too mainstream for them and move on to BSD, Minix or Solaris.

As some already have.

-uso.

Re:you are hollow,

[rvJJax]

yeah, :) you are so right. i though i'm just the only one who think like that.

i planning to move to OpenBSD, just after this project done.

just, wait for it.

-rv77ax

Re:you are hollow,

[thephotoman]

This is why I really think a version of XNA ported to Mono would be totally awesome. Ideally, it'd allow binary compatibility between games written against that API on any platform.

Of course, this is probably a pipe dream.

Re:you are hollow,

[ozphx]

You install andLinux.

Re:you are hollow,

[JasterBobaMereel]

It's odd PS3/2/1, XBox/360, Wii, and Linux Games etc games won't work under Windows ....!

Re:you are hollow,

[HTH NE1]

Back in my day, games booted themselves and didn't need no stinkin' operating system to run underneath them. They took full control of the hardware and provided their own OS designed just to handle access to the disk, i.e. a Disk Operating System, often customized to the game to reduce piracy.

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought was supposed to be "red and green should never be seen?"

Re:Just Delete Vista.

[Anonymous Coward]

ali-baba the computer is gone!!

I suspsect that...

[Psychotria]

if the owner/group permissions were set properly in fstab an easier solution would prevail

Not a vista bug

[phorm]

This isn't a "Vista" bug, as I've seen it happen frequently on a dual boot machine that is only XP+Ubuntu (no Vista)

I ran into this not that long ago and was really stuck scratching my head for awhile, as the fstab settings were definitely correct. However, after a little "chmod -R" magic on the entire FAT32 partition, it reset the recalcitrant permissions and everything worked fine.

Re:Not a vista bug

[Qzukk]

It's not a bug, it's old knowledge getting flushed out of the general awareness of the public. FAT has a read-only bit and Linux knows about it, it's in there along with the system and hidden file bits:

#define ATTR_RO 1 /* read-only */

(linux/msdos_fs.h)

Re:Not a vista bug

[greg1104]

This started in XP actually. The problem is that Microsoft sets the read-only attribute on the special folders that get custom views. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326549 for information about the root cause of the problem reported on this blog. Fixing it on the Windows side requires one to go all old-school and use attrib; cracked me up.

Re:Not a vista bug

[Chris Pimlott]

Glad to see I'm wasn't the only one scratching my head about the claim that FAT32 doesn't support the read-only attribute.

Damn kids these days, don't remember having to use ATTRIB...

Re:Not a vista bug

[Maelwryth]

Look on the bright side. He might have posted that his large files got corrupted.

Re:Not a vista bug

[AmonTheMetalhead]

Kids these days with their fancy filesystems... The general computing knowledge of the current generation is woofully limited, oh well, better for us older fellas, more phish to catch. Hell, kids these days don't even know Vista still has a cli.... This is *NOT* a bug in Ubuntu or linux in general, it's Microsoft violating it's own filesystem spec to have neat tricks in a crappy OS

Re:Not a vista bug

[phorm]

I seem to remember that being supported back as far as the old DOS days and FAT16.

However, if it were a read-only set with something like "attrib", then one shouldn't be able to edit these files in windows either. Seems to be more an issue with the way the 'vfat' module interprets some FAT32 dirs.

Re:Not a vista bug

[geminidomino]

Damn kids these days, don't remember having to use ATTRIB...

I don't know what was better: Being 14 and using ATTRIB +H to "hide" my porn from my dad... or using ATTRIB -H to find his. ^_^

Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work...

[Anonymous Coward]

... gets page linked from slashdot.

Well, at least I adblock.

Ubuntu is Linux?

[incripshin]

Apparently, there is a common belief that Ubuntu and Linux are the same. Actually, there are many types of Linux operating systems like Gentoo, Slackware, Fedora, or SUSE. So Ubuntu => Linux, but !(Linux => Ubuntu). For example, I have run into this issue (not bug) using Slackware, Gentoo, and I think also OpenBSD. My solution is easier, though: stay out of 'My Documents'.

Re:Ubuntu is Linux?

[Darkness404]

But Ubuntu is the most used distros and it can be easily said that it is a Ubuntu bug rather than testing default installs of Gentoo/Slackware/SuSE/Fedora/Arch/etc.

Re:Ubuntu is Linux?

[AceofSpades19]

well then I think Linus should mark every kernel bug as a specific ubuntu bug instead of testing all the distros, because obviously no one cares about the rest of them

Re:Ubuntu is Linux?

[Darkness404]

But which is easier to test for someone who isn't a kernel hacker, A) a default Ubuntu or B) the latest kernel. But what about compile-time flags, who's kernel tree, etc. By basing it on a standard Ubuntu install, the average person can still report kernel bugs without messing around with kernel hacking.

Just Delete The Egomaniac.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I'm having a problem with permissions between Vista and Ubuntu. What should I do?

Adopt a philosophy of ideological inflexibility, intolerance, ignorance, immaturity, and narcissism?

...or...

Run a shell script or two?

Decisions, decisions...

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Yeah seriously, why the fuck is this on Slashdot? I'm not the "stuff that matters" whiner type but either timothy never used a Linux distro and thinks this is newsworthy, or this is the slowest news day ever :).

not news

[spandex_panda]

user discovers chmod ... blogs about it ... boooooring.

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[Darkness404]

Well I guess your grandma isn't using XP....

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[saturnism]

that's it, i'm outa here. of all the years i stood by slashdot, this post just did it for me.

good bye news for non nerds
good bye dupes
good bye first posts
good bye trolls
good bye horrible commenting system and the stupid slider

tell me if i'm wrong

[nawcom]

But this probably isn't that complicated. For year and years in strange situations or another, when files were placed on a fat32 partition in windows in certain conditions, users in Linux couldn't freely access the file unless the partition was mounted with "-o umask=000". In fact I just bought a shitty thumb drive, stuck it in my laptop running Slack and the hotplugging daemon (yes... slackware has that oooOOOOOoh) picked it up and mounted it. I opened it up and saw they had this E3 something or another windows app on it, so I tried to delete it. Nope, permission issues. So I manually unmounted and mounted with umask=000, and i could delete it fine.

I did RTFA, and I must say this is the dumbest post ever. If any fs coders can figure out what issue this person was having, I'm curious, for it doesn't sound like anything new at all.

Re:tell me if i'm wrong

[Qzukk]

OK, you are wrong. And you'd have known it had you looked at his screenshots showing most of the permissions being "right" (except for the special folders).

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=646671&cid=24610199 is where I explained that FAT does in fact have a Read Only bit, and
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=646671&cid=24610565 is where someone else dug up why Windows has set the Read Only bit.

oh my god.

[nawcom]

The Effectiveness of the Ubuntu Forums

(The link this person gives in his blog post)

I swear to christ, reading that page made me want to kill a kitten.

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[jamie]

either timothy never used a Linux distro and thinks this is newsworthy, or this is the slowest news day ever

Timothy was last seen putting Ubuntu on an XO. He's been using Linux at least since I met him in 1999.

It's August, every day is a slow news day :)

bumper upper

[Anonymous Coward]

c'mon mods, that is reasonably geeky funny in a twisted way.

coincidence?

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter is typical of argumentative gasbags in his wild invocations to the irrational, the magic, and the fantastic to dramatize his views.

well, I know where you generated this, but it's just damn scary that most of it is factually correct...

I have mod points....

[rhathar]

but there's no 'Mod article down'

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[SirLurksAlot]

Ha, I was so thinking the same thing. The gist of this "story" is that they had a problem getting Vista and Ubuntu to work together (*mock gasp* I've never heard of such a thing!) and then proceeded to fix it. *yawn* To top it all off the linked article is a blog post from the submitter. Give me a break.

For external drives bigger than 2 GB

[tepples]

NTFS-3G works pretty well. I'm not sure FAT32 is really necessary any more.

Unless you have an SDHC card that you're sneakernetting between your PC and a digital camera, or you have an external hard drive that you're sneakernetting between a Windows or Ubuntu PC and either a Mac or an Xbox 360. Cameras, Macs, and game consoles tend not to work with NTFS out of the box.

IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[tepples]

What keeps people from implementing ext3 support for Windows? The Linux source code is obviously available, so are Windows ext2 drivers reimplementations that aren't using existing code? Or is there some deeper problem?

For a while, Microsoft once charged roughly $1,000 for the "IFS Kit" used to develop installable file system drivers. To work around this, programs such as "Explore2fs" had to act like WinRAR and 7-Zip, where you don't really mount a partition but you can still drag files in and out. (The price appears to have dropped since then.) For another thing, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista put an annoying "Test Mode" banner in all four corners of the desktop if the user installs a device driver that hasn't been signed by a publisher who pays an annual fee of at least $200 to a commercial certificate authority trusted by Microsoft.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[ozphx]

At least $200! Thats almost two developer hours of money!

Pretty certain you can chuck whatever cert you want in the trusted root store / disable this behaviour.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[westlake]

64-bit versions of Windows Vista put an annoying "Test Mode" banner in all four corners of the desktop if the user installs a device driver that hasn't been signed by a publisher who pays an annual fee of at least $200 to a commercial certificate authority trusted by Microsoft.
.

$200 to certify a driver for something as elemental as a filing system seems reasonable enough.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[silent_artichoke]

I had to do the registry change to get an unsigned driver to load in 64-bit Vista Ultimate. The driver was for a Virtual CD/DVD drive so I could mount ISOs. I have never seen this banner you mention, and I have been running that machine for a year. In fact, I reloaded the machine once and had to install that same driver. Do you have a source for this, or did I get lucky? I would love to get a screenshot of it and set it as my co-worker's wallpaper.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[tepples]

$200 to certify a driver for something as elemental as a filing system seems reasonable enough.

The only reason that one would get away with it is because ext3fs (along with the rest of Linux) is GPLv2, not GPLv3. Under GPLv3, anybody who distributes copies of the installable file system would have to distribute Installation Information, and as I read the GPLv3, this would involve buying a certificate for each recipient of the source code.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[tepples]

Do you have a source for [Test Mode in Windows Vista 64-bit], or did I get lucky? I would love to get a screenshot of it and set it as my co-worker's wallpaper.

My source is Kernel-Mode Code Signing Walkthrough.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[tepples]

At least $200! Thats almost two developer hours of money!

In what city of what state/province of what country?

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[ozphx]

I wouldve thought anywhere. This is South Australia.

I'd expect to pay at least that for someone that can develop drivers without introducing horrible bugs :P

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[Milyardo]

Many Vitrual CD-ROM drives don't operate in the kernel, but instead operate inside the user-space.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[Joe Snipe]

| At least $200! Thats almost two developer hours of money!

In what city of what state/province of what country?

I think the OP's point is that if you are creating hardware for public consuption on pc's with the ability to run vista, $200 is not an unreasonable amount of money. It is also fair to say any price is unreasonable. I think MS feels like they need to spec out any driver in the interests of security, and they are the only trustworthy group to do that. In that vein, I am guessing they charge $200 to keep from being overwhelmed by every guy with a pcb from radioshack and half a dream.

I'm no microsoft apologist, but this has been a valid form of traffic restriction since before the toll bridge! I can come up with many ways that microsoft is evil, but this ain't one...

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[tepples]

I think the OP's point is that if you are creating hardware for public consuption on pc's with the ability to run vista, $200 is not an unreasonable amount of money.

A file system is not hardware.

Nor is hardware developed for a close-knit circle of hobbyist hardware hackers exactly "for public consumption", but that's a topic for a different article.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[Drooling Iguana]

I initially read that as "Kernel-Mode Code Singing Walkthrough" and thought it was the best idea ever.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[ozphx]

My main point was that if you are dropping a few hundred developer hours of time into writing and maintaining a file system driver, the $200 is insignificant.

Additionally I'm pretty certain you could drop the CA-Cert root in your trusted store and it would all work fine.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[tepples]

My main point was that if you are dropping a few hundred developer hours of time into writing and maintaining a file system driver, the $200 is insignificant.

Replace "a file system driver" with "an application" to see how Microsoft will try to kill free software. It has already happened to Xbox 360.

Re:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[the_B0fh]

For every .version that you put out? Sure.... especially since you're paying for the product right?

If not, why would J.Random developer who already put time in be willing to spit out another $200 to get *ONE* specific version signed? Just so that *YOU* can trust it more?

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[ROMRIX]

Yeah seriously, why the fuck is this on Slashdot? I'm not the "stuff that matters" whiner type but either timothy never used a Linux distro and thinks this is newsworthy, or this is the slowest news day ever :).

If you think it's slow now, just wait. Tomorrow we're discussing "Ubuntu, 'Where's root!'"

Lack of Free (or even shared-source) drivers

[tepples]

It's not necessarily you being lame, it's either game developers being lame by not porting their games

Up until very recently, it was also video card manufacturers being lame by not making OpenGL drivers for Linux that the community can help debug. But ATI, one of the two makers of chipsets for video cards,[1] plans to stop being lame. And some people would claim that it's distribution maintainers being lame by not providing more thorough binary compatibility across multiple families of GNU/Linux distributions. ("What's an LSB again?")

[1] Intel GMA is not available on a card.

Re:Lack of Free (or even shared-source) drivers

[bhtooefr]

Actually, I'm pretty sure you can get a GMA chipset on an ISA or PCI card.

But, you also get a processor, and RAM, on that same card, and they're designed to run on a passive ISA or PCI backplane. ;)

Re:Lack of Free (or even shared-source) drivers

[elashish14]

It also happens that ATI used to be the bane of a Linux user's experience until they realized that they were failing as a company (getting beaten by nVidia) and opened their drivers and in the mean time hitched up with AMD (another failing company, to Intel). Now if it's a successful company that begins to do the same, then we have real power. Until then, it looks like hardware/software manufacturers will just see FOSS as a last resort.

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously never really did fit in here. I mean, a true slashdotter would have titled his post "Last post!"

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[Your.Master]

Nor has she ever gone outside in her life.

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[SeekerDarksteel]

Let's just make it red, blue, AND green should never been seen.

Hey, did it just get awfully dark in here?

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[Bert64]

So you're saying everything should be red?

Normal, expected behaviour, non issue

[AmonTheMetalhead]

What the fuck is the issue here? This is "normal" behaviour, Windows Vista sets the System bit (don't ask) on the directories, and that way they get mounted -ro for everyone but 'root'. Ever heard of the command "attrib" on DOS? Bug my ass.

ARGH

[AmonTheMetalhead]

For crying out loud, *THIS IS NOT A BUG*! Bloody idiots, take an old MS Dos manual and look up ATTRIB, *READ THE FUCKING MANUAL*

Re: Ubuntu and NTFS

[szaka]

NTFS-3G changes rapidly and historically Ubuntu included an old, lower performing version of the NTFS-3G driver. However the one in Ubuntu 8.04 should be ok.

Amarok has a documented performance issue with NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#dd

The NTFS-3G web site has many tips what could be the problem for high CPU usage: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#cpu100

Sometimes NTFS defragmentation makes a magic.

The focus of the NTFS-3G development is reliability and functionality over performance. The performance optimizations started only recently and the current development versions perform close or sometimes surprisingly even better than ext3.

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[Hucko]

I'd suggest she take a walk out bush (the terrain not the bloke). In heavily wooded areas you get... blue and green. If it works in nature, the only things stopping it working in production is incompetence and prejudice. However, you lead me to believe that she is no longer using that saying... regards.

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[Hucko]

The whole saying is 'blue and green should never be seen without something in between.' 'tis a fashion thing, I personally disagree with. However, I have only a few people coming to me for fashion advice.

You may be more right than you know.

[jbeaupre]

On a whim, I checked for FAT64 and found it does exist (sort of) on Vista already. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

TRWTF is...

[Anonymous Coward]

MSDOS' read-only bit is much more like the immutable bit in ext2 than a true permission bit, IMHO. chattr -i should be required, rather than chmod u+w.

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

One AC to another, I thought adblock only kept you from seeing the ad, so wouldn't he still get the revenue? I am just trying to understand why you feel superior.

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[Anonymous Coward]

I adblock googleanalytics

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[cleatsupkeep]

Like grandmother like grandson (using Slashdot as a basis for this assumption).