Chown Message

[jaygeetiny]

Using the set-up shown in my signature, the phrase "chown: /mnt/sda1/tce: Operation not permitted" follows immediately after the last listed installed .tce on the bootscreen.

This has happened in tc1.0 and tc1.1; in each case at the first boot following entry of "tce=sda1" as a boot parameter and on subsequent boots when "tce=sda1" is omitted.

Everything seems to work fine but presumably the message indicates a problem.

[roberts]

The cause is likely that  your sda1 i not formatted to support permissions.

[jaygeetiny]

Thanks for that lead.

My sda1 is a FAT32 formatted 4GB USB stick and it seems that "You can't modify permissions on a FAT filesystem. You can give the whole system default permissions when you mount it though, using the umask option to mount, which you can also throw in your  /etc/fstab file. Try (replace XXX with your user is and group id): /dev/hda1  /winc  vfat  uid=XXX,gid=XXX  0 0"

Using sudo has worked so far and being the sole user I'll soldier on until the problem has to be fixed.

As this question hasn't cropped up in the four or five other distros I've used on FAT32 formatted USB sticks maybe it'll be a non-issue.

[mikshaw]

this question hasn't cropped up in the four or five other distros

That's not surprising.  TC is a special breed, including features not available in your typical distro.  One such feature is the ability of the regular user add more applications to the tce directory as he choses, regardless of what username you boot with.  In order to accomplish this, the directory is chowned during initialization.

[Juanito]

My sda1 is a FAT32 formatted 4GB USB stick and it seems that "You can't modify permissions on a FAT filesystem.

After a lot of grief with this issue, I swapped to using ext2 formatted usb sticks for dsl a couple of years back and now use the same thing for tc.

You can use extlinux (tc extension exists) to create the exact analogy of an isolinux boot and the freeware ext2 drivers for windows (should they be required) allow you to read write to the usb stick without problems.

[jaygeetiny]

My sda1 is a FAT32 formatted 4GB USB stick and it seems that "You can't modify permissions on a FAT filesystem.

After a lot of grief with this issue, I swapped to using ext2 formatted usb sticks for dsl a couple of years back and now use the same thing for tc.

You can use extlinux (tc extension exists) to create the exact analogy of an isolinux boot and the freeware ext2 drivers for windows (should they be required) allow you to read write to the usb stick without problems.

My mistake: on reflection I plugged-in FAT32 formatted sticks when installing the other distros but they were fdisk'ed to ext2 during installation.

I'll try the extlinux route when I've finished trying out a few more apps.       

[tobiaus]

One such feature is the ability of the regular user add more applications to the tce directory as he choses, regardless of what username you boot with.  In order to accomplish this, the directory is chowned during initialization.

although when i boot from livecd, loading restore and tce from a fat32 sda1, (good for machines that don't allow usb boot) it complains that it cannot chown, every time i boot. i haven't tried to understand why because it's doing what i want it to, it's simply trying to do something that in this instance is superfluous. when i usb boot, i use extlinux, like juanito. i could also cd boot with an ext2 usb key, right now i only use ext for bootable partitions.

[mikshaw]

loading restore and tce from a fat32 sda1

It's precisely the issue we've been talking about.  FAT16 and FAT32 have no suport for file ownership. In that case you can't chown, so you get an error when TC tries to chown.  It might not cause any problems for you, but if you had a ext drive containing the tce directory you wouldn't be able to save new extensions there if that directory didn't give you the permission to write.

[jaygeetiny]

loading restore and tce from a fat32 sda1

It's precisely the issue we've been talking about.  FAT16 and FAT32 have no suport for file ownership. In that case you can't chown, so you get an error when TC tries to chown.  It might not cause any problems for you, but if you had a ext drive containing the tce directory you wouldn't be able to save new extensions there if that directory didn't give you the permission to write.

So if my useage of TC is confined to a bootable USB stick and I'm prepared to accept the security implications of not having separate root and user logins a non-chown capability shouldn't be a problem? 

[mikshaw]

I think you're correct.   Personally I would discourage the use a FAT filesystem with home=xxx or opt=xxx or local=xxx (unless local was a file), but archived files such as extensions and backups are not negatively affected by being stored on a partition that doesn't support linux file permissions.