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Strange problem with Documents folder while browsing usb drive from kubuntu

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dpreacher
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Strange problem with Documents folder while browsing usb drive from kubuntu

This a really strange problem and I dunno how it exactly happens.
When I browse the contents of my USB drive (with PortableApps installed on it) from a normal user account, all folders and files are possible to be read from and written to except any thing under Documents folder. Now the more tricky part is even if I rename Documents folder to something else, Kubuntu gutsy does not let me remove files using the normal user account. I can sudo rm -f from a bash shell, but the command-line doesn't give me the convenience of choosing a random set of files using the mouse and I don't think I am going to enable the root account...for safety purposes.

Can anyone else try out with Kubuntu and/or other linux distros, to see where exactly the problem lies?

arqbrulo
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I think

the problem lies within the Desktop.ini file that's created in the folder whose default icon is changed. If I have a folder with a custom icon, I'm not able to modify the contents with Ubuntu, but if I delete the Desktop.ini file (and unmount-remount), I'm have full access to the folder.

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dpreacher
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Thanks :D

Thank you argbrulo for figuring out the 'culprit' so quickly. So now I gotta remove the files to another normal folder under Windows and then selectively delete or move files under gutsy.

Thank you once again. Biggrin

Best Regards,
Diabolic Preacher

Diabolic Preacher
As Is

rab040ma
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So now I gotta remove the
So now I gotta remove the files to another normal folder 
under Windows and then selectively delete or move files 
under gutsy.

Not necessarily. You could just remove the read-only flag from the directory.

I can't recall if that is as simple as chmod 0775 Documents; I seem to recall that OS X has a special menu choice for it, but there should be some way to do it in Linux.

In Windows (from a command shell window) you can run attrib -r \Documents (and any documents under it that have the read-only flag set). Once you do that, you will lose the pretty icon in Explorer, but you'll get the behavior you expect everywhere. You could put that into a cmd file (created with Notepad) in the root of your drive that looks like

attrib -r \Documents
attrib -r \Documents\Music
attrib -r \Documents\Pictures
attrib -r \Documents\videos

... etc

The FAT filesystem driver on non-Windows OS's seem to think a "read-only" flag on a directory should make the directory read-only, whereas Windows uses the "read-only" flag to tell Explorer to look at the desktop.ini and show an icon or whatever. You can't remove the read-only flag with Explorer, you have to use attrib (in Windows) or else tell Windows not to show an icon or do the other special things the "read-only" flag tells it to do, and maybe it will remove the flag.

MC

Jimbo
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"bug" in Ubuntu then

The Windows standard for directories is that if the ReadOnly flag is set on them, they should be inspected for a desktop.ini file, but that they are still fully writable.

It sounds like the fat driver in use in ubuntu isn't honouring this, and is instead treating the RO flag as meaning Read Only (well, who'd have figured)

There might be mount options you can use to "force" the permissions the mount, but I'm not sure.

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