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Which Filesystem Do You Use On Portable Media For Linux Systems?
An anonymous reader writes "Most people use MS filesystems on Disk-On-Keys, and portable hard drives, as these are readable from most machines. But this way you lose the files' permission information, which many times is very inconvenient (you must agree that having Ubuntu asking you whether to execute or display every text file or image you open from a DOK is annoying). Using 'regular' Linux filesystems like ext keeps the permissions, but may require using the superuser when switching machines (as the UIDs are different). So do any of you have a creative solution for this problem?"
Then, if I need to preserve Linux file settings I'll zip, tar, or cpio and store them on the stick that way.
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This is hardly a problem unique to Linux, although as you point out Linux does have its own special requirements that may make using FAT32 a bit problematic.
My home network is a combination of Mac OS X clients and Linux servers (Debian is so easily made so Mac friendly...). I have a USB key that I don't tend to use too often (online storage has removed much of that need), but I did decide at one point that easy interoperability between OS's was important, while at the same time needing OS-specific support from time-to-time, for specific applications and data.
My solution? I formatted my key for FAT32, and then created some disk images on the key formatted them to whatever OS-specific format was suitable (HFS+, ext3, etc.). By leaving sufficient room on the main FAT32 volume, I can readily store platform-neutral data, and inside the images I can store whatever OS-specific data (such as applications) that don't need to be accessible on every system I encounter.
This does require an extra mounting steps. In OS X, it entails plugging in the key, and then double-clicking on the DMG file to mount it. In Linux, I have to mount the ext3 image using the loop pseudo-device. Of course, this is only necessary if attempting to access data in one of the OS-specific formatted images: accessing shared data merely requires mounting the key itself (generally automatically handled by the OS).
It's hardly perfect, but it does mean you can have one key that can have both shared and OS-specific data on it for as many OS's as you'd like to have at your disposal.
Yaz.
Sure it does.
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
Mods: not funny. I've formatted large USB sticks as NTFS before. Works fine for r/w on Linux and Windows, not so much for Macs, because OSX doesn't have native write support for NTFS.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I had the exact same problem a while back. My solution was a little less straightforward than some, but is still simple enough. Basically, I leverage the freeware software Ext2 IFS, which installs software onto Windows that allows it to recognize the contents of Ext2/3 partitions.
Basically, I have my disk formatted with two partitions:
On the FAT32 partition, I place the latest version of Ext2 IFS. When I access the system on my main Linux box, I just mount / use the Ext3 partition.
When I visit friends or family and I plug it into their Windows box for the first time, Windows recognizes the FAT32 partition, so I can install the Ext2 IFS software that I put onto that partition. From then on (and every subsequent access), Windows automatically mounts it!
Windows doesn't reflect the Ext3 permissions, but if you have physical, portable access to an unencrypted hard drive, those mean nothing anyway. And, of course, make sure to ask friends and family before installing filesystem drivers :)
It would be nice if the default was to pick a random arbitrary and large UID so the chance of UID clashes would be remote.
You know what would be great? If someone made a daemon for mapping UID's between machines. That'd be fantastic, but I'm sure no one else has thought of such a thing.
I experimented with UDF a couple of years ago. As always, Windows is the problem. No matter what I did, Windows did not see the thumbdrive as a drive letter. And Google didn't show up any useful pages either.