[wellylug] Need some help with Gentoo

[michael at diaspora.gen.nz]

Jamie Dobbs writes:
>I fully understand your explanation but I honestly can't see how that
>works. The same thing would work find under Mandrake and RadHat with no
>problems so why won't it work with Gentoo?

Which same thing, the permissions on the mountpoint, or the fstab line?

>Also according to your explanation there is no way around this problem
>which basically means that I have wasted 3-4 days of my time installing
>Gentoo and all of the supporting software that I required only to find
>that it won't come close to doing the job I require of it.

Hey, calm down!  :)

Did you try what Rob suggested, which was to change the order of
"defaults" and "user" in your fstab lines?

Actually, reading the man page for mount(1) on my Debian system, I see:

  user   Allow an ordinary user to mount  the  file  system.   The
	 name  of  the mounting user is written to mtab so that he
	 can unmount the file system again.  This  option  implies
	 the  options noexec, nosuid, and nodev (unless overridden
	 by  subsequent   options,   as   in   the   option   line
	 user,exec,dev,suid).

So have you tried mounting those filesystems as yourself, rather than
as root?

For that matter, on (again, my Debian system) I can achieve what I think
you want with the following:

    sudo mount -t vfat -o rw,user,uid=1000,umask=000 /dev/hda1 /msdos

Where uid 1000 is my own uid.  That gets me:

    moment$ ls -l /msdos/
    total 203312
    drwxrwxrwx    3 michael  root        24576 Aug 23  1999 My Documents
    -rwxrwxrwx    1 michael  root      1334014 Nov 14  2001 PCGN505VEVX.CHM

That about what you were thinking of?
    -- michael.