[wellylug] Need some help with Gentoo

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <1054527327.670.2.camel at Planet_Irk>, Jamie Dobbs writes:
>>[Mounted VFAT permissions "wrong"]
>
>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?
>
>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.

Presumably Redhat/Mandrake are using a different "umask" mount option to
what Gentoo is using (by default)  (see the mount(8) manpage, search for
FAT).  

FWIW, I typically mount my VFAT file systems (camera, USB storage, etc)
with uid=MYUID gid=MYGID so that I'm the one that can manipulate them,
and no one else can.  On systems that "only" I use (eg, my laptop) I
just stick that into the fstab entry.

If there's more than one user that should manipulate them the "best"
approach would be to stick all those users in a group, and mount the
VFAT file systems gid=THATGROUP, and umask=0770 or umask=0775.  

If you just don't care that everyone can write to the files, mount the
filesystem with umask=0777 and be done with it.

>If this is an example of the 'quality' of Gentoo then I fear that they
>are wasting their time!

AFAIK Gentoo is "some user assembly may be required", whereas both
Redhat and Mandrake are going after the "one click install and it all
works".  The level of manual setup will probably vary because of that.