Permissions? File Association? Brick Wall Syndrome!

[Calum]

okay, i have a couple of questions re: linux. I have read the relevant sections in the redhat7.0 manual, (that's the distro i have) and not come up with any answers, once more, brick wall syndrome. I'll outline my dilemmas and if you happen to be passing through and know the answer, maybe you could post it here for my and other peoples' benefit...

Firstly, permissions. I have read a lot about this and it boils down to not much help. My situation is that i have my second windows (fat32) partition, /dev/hda5 (D: in Windows) set up as /mnt/win and i can get read access no bother, but not write access. There are only 2 users for my computer (other than root) me and my girlfriend, and i want both of us to have access to /mnt/win.
I tried:

chmod -R 666 /mnt/win

and also a few other combinations that made sense in the manual, but to no avail whatsoever. still no access. I tried logging into GNOME as root too, to use the graphical stuff to sort it out, again, looked okay, but nothing changed.
Am i missing something? something else? is there some file i can edit directly to change this?

Also, file type associations...
I found a thing in the GNOME control center called 'MIME type settings' or something similar that looked like it was for this, but i have changed the settings and they refuse to take effect.
I changed the setting for application/pdf from 'xpdf' to 'kghostview' which i prefer as a program, then back again when it didn't work.
What i want is to be able to doubleclick on the file, and have the relevant application (specified by me) open up automatically.
I haven't even found a way to do this at all in KDE yet, and the GNOME way does not appear to work.
Is there a config file i can edit somewhere? anybody know? or is there some crucial step i may be missing out of my file association procedure in GNOME? and how do you do this in KDE anyway?
Also, any idea how i can change this setting for all users rather than just one at a time? (that's a question i have had for a lot of functions actually.)
Any help will be appreciated, but don't bust yr pans for little old me, seriously if i asked all the questions i had about this OS and you all answered fully, none of us would even have time to sleep!

[dbl221]

Well here are my thoughts....a FAT32 partition or VFAT as its called in Linux has permissons of 777....thats just part of FAT32....no changing it.  The fact that it is mounted as /mnt/whatever means nothing.  Remember when you partitiond the harddrive then you formatted it with FAT32....thats when the 777 file permissions were decided, if you formated a partition as NTFS or second extended it would created the low level file system stuff and all the limitations that that entails.

Hope that explains it.

As for Mime types....well I have not played with them much in Gnome or KDE, so I can't comment.

Good Luck..  

[kinky]

i dont use gnome anymore, dont remeber or have a quick way to look.... but...

in KDE you can open control center, go to file browsing and file associations

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by dbl221:
Well here are my thoughts....a FAT32 partition or VFAT as its called in Linux has permissons of 777....thats just part of FAT32....no changing it.

Does this mean the permissions are permanently set, and what's more, they are permanently set so that everybody has read/write access? something funny is going on if that is the case then, since i don't have permission to write to that drive (and i did when i first set red hat 7 up so i have done something to change it...)
  :confused:  

thanks for the input guys! i appreciate it!  

[foobar]

I guess i am talking useless crap, but maybe this may help someone .. ?

with permissions, i always simply use tha midnight commander -

# mc

point to the file, and press [CTRL-X] [C]. This will open a lil' window that is very useful for stting permissions.

i don't know how to use it with partitions, or whatsoever. but mc is in text mode, so if you ever are forced to use the fantastic linux command line, try mc.

[Centurian]

Hey,

Just open a terminal then su in as root. Then type Konqueror and hit enter. Now you can read and write to your windows partitions no problem.

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: Centurian ]

[voidmain]

Sorry, been out for a while.  This is pretty easy to do.  If you want both you and your girlfriend to be able to access the WIN drive but noone else, create a UNIX group that both of your userIDs belong to (e.g. "ddrive" group) and set up your entry in /etc/fstab like this:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/win vfat uid=501,gid=503,umask=007 0 0

where "501" would be the number associated with your userid from /etc/passwd and the "503" being the number associated with the "ddrive" group from /etc/group. Then when you do an "ls -l /mnt/win" you should see the files are owned by "calum" and group of "ddrive" and have permissions set like this:
-rwxrwx--- (on files) and drwxrwx--- (on directories)
NOTE: You don't actually have to set the "uid" in this example since both of you are covered in the "ddrive" group, just stuck it in as an example.

Of course you can give full access to anyone on your computer by:

/dev/hda5 /mnt/win vfat umask=000 0 0

which should show owner of "root" group of "root" and permissions like:
-rwxrwxrwx (on files) and drwxrwxrwx (on directories)

After you make the change to /etc/fstab just unmount and mount the /mnt/win partition and you should see the effects immediately:

# umount /mnt/win; mount /mnt/win

You can "chmod" all day long on FAT/FAT32 partitions and it will not work because FAT/FAT32 are not capable of Windows file system security let alone UNIX file system security. The security must be set globally at mount time as in my example. NTFS is the only Windows file system capable of file/directory security, and then only from Windows.

And if anyone would like a more in depth discussion on permissions including chmod, octal, umask, user/group, ACLs etc, feel free to start another topic and I would be more than happy to cover this for the n00bs..

[ March 15, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[Calum]

Thanks for the help VoidMain,
regarding mime types, it seems that a few people have had this problem.
So i'll take the liberty of posting this stuff that i found on mail.gnome.org
 

quote:> On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Minson, John M. [Contractor] wrote:
>
> > All my attempts to change the mime association of a <something>.mpeg file
> > to 'gtv' fail.
> > The 'edit mime types' operation seems to work and shows 'gtv' in both the
> > open and view fields of the Mime Type Actions . When I open a 'mpeg' it
> > insists on running 'xanim' .
> > Is there some system wide default overriding my personnel settings ?
----------------------------------
Ralph Slooten wrote:
> I have the same problem with MTV. Each time I get an error that xamin can't
> be opened. Only when I right-mouse-click on the MPG and select view doe it
> work.
>
----------------------------------
> I don't know why the mime-types capplet insists on screwing this up.
> Take a look at the ~/.gnome/mime-info/user.keys file. If you see
> "[(null)]" anywhere then remove it. My user-keys file looks like:
>
>   video/mpeg:
>           open=mtvp -l %f
>           view=mtvp -l %f
>
> If I use the control panel capplet to edit any mime types, what my
> user-keys file turns into is:
>
>   video/mpeg:
>           [(null)]open=mtvp -l %f
>           [(null)]view=mtvp -l %f
>
> I don't have any idea what those [(null)]s are supposed to be for, but
> get rid of them and everything will work as you expect.
-------------------------------------
H

[voidmain]

I didn't see any questions about mime types.  Mime types do not have anything to do with permissions (I assume you know that and are just changing the subject).  Also, traditionally "mime types" have nothing to do with file extensions (*.doc, *.txt, etc). Traditional mime types actually check the data to determine what type of file it is (look at the /etc/mime-magic file for local mime types).  Now KDE has added "extension" based associations similar to the way MS does it, and this can be changed under Preferences->"File Browsing"->"File Associations" which also happens to be where you set your browser "content types" (like "image/gif", "video/mpeg" etc). Also for getting video/audio stuff working well with Konqueror you are going to want to install the "plugger" rpm. I have found that getting all of your video/audio settings working right in Konqueror/plugger can be a painful trial and error processes and every time I set up a new machine I have to go through it as I've not figured out the exact sequence that makes Konqueror happy.  Eventually I do get everything working though.

Also, you need to make sure you have players available for all the different content types you want to be able to handle (RealPlayer, Xanim, etc). "noatun" for instance (KDE Media Player) which can play MP3, MPEG, WAV and with plugins Divix, etc).  And you can obviously use the Netscape plugins for Flash etc.

I wish there was a good step by step guide for setting up Konqueror to handle all the media types but this is one of few areas where I had a difficult time finding out how other people did it. Like I said, I have always been successfull at getting everything working the way I want but not without trouble (getting embedded WAV files to play seamlessly through plugger for instance).  If you run accross a foolproof doc please share.

[Calum]

i certainly will.
plugger, eh? okeydoke...

yes, i was changing the subject because i had originally asked about file type associations, and about permissions. You rallied to the call and answered about permissions, but i was having a bit of hard luck with file types.

Turns out in GNOME, i needed to right click my GNOME (sawfish) desktop and DEselect the "detect file types by mime content rather than by extension" box, and hey presto, GNOME now opens all my files in their right application no bother at all.
A few people have told me how to get to the file type settings in KDE, and everybody says something different! they all say how easy it is though! anyway, i will keep trying, KDE hasn't actually stuffed up the file types thing yet, but i love knowing how stuff works so i can be a smartarse when it all does go belly up.
I just got enlightenment for example (in GNOME, looking forward to trying to make it go in KDE though!) and i notice it has tons of features i would never have been able to even imagine unless i had seen them (split desktops!!!) *but* i still haven't found a way to make it rotate my desktop background pictures randomly at set intervals from files. There will be a way, i'm sure, but i am just saying that even with all the new stuff i'm getting, i still fixate on the one little thing that i *don't* know how to do!