Comment by mitthrowaway2

1 day ago

In my experience, the remaining difficulties with Linux tend to revolve around managing ownership and permissions of files and directories.

I recently plugged in my external hard drive into my Linux PC and it just wouldn't read it. "You do not have permission to access this drive" or something like that. The solution after googling ended up being (for some reason) some combination of sudo chown -R user /dev/sda1 and unplugging and reconnecting the drive.

No way to do that from the GUI (on KDE at least) and I'm not sure how I'd even solve that problem if I didn't know the super user password.

Still glad to be using Linux, of course, but sometimes these problems still pop up.

12 comments

mitthrowaway2

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amlib  1 day ago

This shouldn't happen with external disks formatted with ntfs, ext or udf. If you have an EXT4 or something like that external disk things get more hazy...

  • mitthrowaway2  1 day ago

    Whether it should or shouldn't, it did. But I think the issue is less that it happened, and more that the user interface doesn't respond to the "no permission" error by offering up a button you can click to attempt to grant yourself permission. If it can be done through the terminal, there should be a novice friendly way as well.

    (For that matter, a novice user shouldn't even have to know how their external hard drive is formatted! It might not even be their drive; it could be a family member attempting to share photos with them. If they're just plugging it in for the first time and seeing errors, they'd be pretty hesitant to mess around with the terminal typing in commands they don't understand).

    • amlib  1 day ago

      Sorry, I didn't mean to imply this isn't an important problem that needs to be addressed. I mostly agree with what you say and I bet the right way to deal with this is to have it be mounted with a special user space filesystem like fuse that wraps the permissions to always look correct for the user that mounted it, but I guess no one so far has decided to take upon such task...

  • crazysim  1 day ago

    Can't it just do what I _mean_ if it's a Desktop install and mount it like ntfs, udf, or etc?

    • bisby  1 day ago

      no? A file system is the format that the data on the disk is stored as. If you mount an ext4 disk as ntfs, it wouldn't load properly. It's not just the interface for loading the data, it's how the data is actually stored.

      3 replies →

noAnswer  1 day ago

I don't doubt you had that problem. But it, and the solution you want, sound a bit strange. You want a button that gives your user access to everything despite its access settings... Than login and work as root.

I mean it's hard to tell what really happened. But a different user could have created this files with access rights only for himself on purpose. Something one can do with NTFS on Windows too. It also could have been a distro bug.

> but sometimes these problems still pop up.

I'm a 90% Windows- 9.5% Linux- 0.5% Mac-Admin at day job: Don't tell me Windows has no problems poping up. ;-)

  • mitthrowaway2  1 day ago

    Yes. Another user could have restricted access rights on purpose, maybe? But I can still apparently seize them for myself by typing an arcane command into the terminal. Why shouldn't the UI give me a way to do this more easily?

    If it requires typing in an admin password to solve, so be it, but at least the UI could lead me to the answer while offering a password prompt.

    And yes, I wasn't telling you that Windows has no problems. In fact, Windows probably caused this problem -- this drive worked just fine with Linux the night before; then I transferred some files into it from Windows and plugged it back into my Linux computer and suddenly this happened. I have no doubt that Windows was responsible for messing up the drive state and causing the problem. But to a non-technical user, it's not a question of who is to blame; Windows reads the drive fine whereas Linux gives an error that has no obvious solution. And it can't be solved by right clicking the drive in the explorer and selecting "take ownership and mount" or something like that, it requires using an unfamiliar command into the terminal to fix the problem. And that's basically the case with most file-permission errors that I encounter on Linux systems.