How to make sure MS Word files will NOT be "read-only" ?

[Zenonpl]

Hi,
I am planning to use SUSE as a main OS in my school's library computer room. This is the place where students can use the computers to browse the Internet as well as print their own work - most of which is in the MS Word/Excel format. They will be bringing in their work on their pendrives, opening it in OpenOffice and possibly wanting to edit it - and ooops, it's impossible, since all the documents will be read-only.

I've already had a problem removing the "read-only" setting from my other NTFS partition when I'm not logged in as root, so I expect more problems to come, as the simple operation of logging in as root and setting the "can view and modify the content" tag for all the users doesn't work at all, I either get an error message, or simply nothing. Although I have finally managed to make the NTFS partition writable by editing the fstab file, (dmask=002 instead of the default 022) it hasn't worked for for the individual files, therefore I still can't edit my WinWord documents stored on a NTFS partition; I expect the same problem will be with the students' files brought on the FAT-partitioned pendrives. Is there a permament, working and stable workaround for this?
Thank you.

[caf4926]

Read only?
You imply that files on the pen drive will be read only.

I never get this behaviour

[growbag]

Here is the solution I found for openSUSE 11.1 if that helps -

How do I kick hal in the backside? - openSUSE Forums

It's stable, and you can simply add a group instead of a user, so if you add the group users, then everyone should be able to read/write to any external device.

The one problem is that updates overwrite the config file which is really annoying.

I must say though, I haven't had any problems with external (or internal for that matter) devices under 11.2, I think they finally gave in and reluctantly accepted that users need to actually write to USB drives!

[Zenonpl]

Read only?
You imply that files on the pen drive will be read only.

I never get this behaviour

You know, I'm a newbie to this distro and a newbie here, but I've already read through some of the posts in this forum, and I've noticed that whenever there's people complaining about some issues with SUSE, the standard attitude from the Admins is: "No, no, no there must be something wrong with you, our beloved, shiny, polished, fabulous, god-like Open SUSE is absolutely not at fault here, and actually, how dare you think about it possibly having an issue with anything in the first place?" Well, sorry to inform you, but SUSE is not that great. Instead of just admitting that SUSE does have a problem with disks' access rights (which it DOES - I've found other people complaining about it, too), or at least trying to help me solve it, you prefer to find fault with my attitude.

Oh, and don't forget to remind me that I should have posted this in the Sandbox section, or somewhere else.

@ growbag - thank you. Will try it.

[caf4926]

You know, I'm a newbie to this distro and a newbie here, but I've already read through some of the posts in this forum, and I've noticed that whenever there's people complaining about some issues with SUSE, the standard attitude from the Admins is: "No, no, no there must be something wrong with you, our beloved, shiny, polished, fabulous, god-like Open SUSE is absolutely not at fault here, and actually, how dare you think about it possibly having an issue with anything in the first place?" Well, sorry to inform you, but SUSE is not that great. Instead of just admitting that SUSE does have a problem with disks' access rights (which it DOES - I've found other people complaining about it, too), or at least trying to help me solve it, you prefer to find fault with my attitude.

Oh, and don't forget to remind me that I should have posted this in the Sandbox section, or somewhere else.

@ growbag - thank you. Will try it.

OK. What was that. I just said I don't get this behaviour.

Typically I edit ntfs like this in fstab

Here is a line from on of mine, I put in red the part to edit to:

/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST9160827AS_5RF16D1B-part1 /windows/C ntfs-3g defaults 0 0