Strange Ubuntu/Vista Compatibility Bug, Solved 140
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."
Re:FAT32 (Score:5, Informative)
not news (Score:2, Informative)
Re:FAT32 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.diskinternals.com/ [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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 /etc/fstab (uid value can be found via "getent passwd", it is numeric).
option in
For more info read "man mount" carefully.
Re:Not a vista bug (Score:5, Informative)
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:
(linux/msdos_fs.h)
Re:FAT32 (Score:3, Informative)
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.
IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode (Score:5, Informative)
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:Not a vista bug (Score:5, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com] 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:FAT32 (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:FAT32 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FAT32 (Score:3, Informative)
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:IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode (Score:3, Informative)
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 [microsoft.com].
Re: Ubuntu and NTFS (Score:4, Informative)
Amarok has a documented performance issue with NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#dd [ntfs-3g.org]
The NTFS-3G web site has many tips what could be the problem for high CPU usage: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#cpu100 [ntfs-3g.org]
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.