I’m starting to think I’m never going to get my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install setup and working. I’m so frustrated that I’m hitting one roadblock after another. I’m sure it’s me, I’m not blaming oST or anything else.
I’ve had no end of difficulty getting my data properly mounted and accessible with the right permissions. No matter what I tried, when the system automatically mounted the drives (at /run/user/media) I couldn’t get the system to allow me to change owner and group - even as root. So I edited fstab and added the lines there to permanently mount each drive when booting up. That worked. And it allowed me to change the user/owner and group.
However, I made some changes to a drive and had to add it to fstab. I made the edits and checked my work via the sudo mount -a to be sure there were no errors. Everything was fine so I rebooted and the new drive showed up as expected. Great. Now, I went to the terminal, made sure it opened to the directory where my data was mounted and did the chown command - running as sudo. No matter what I do, it’s not letting me change the ownership or group - even as root. I’ve gone into the folder I wanted changed and run:
sudo chown -R 1000:1002 *
This should change the ownership and group of all files/folders recursively, while leaving the folder I’m in alone. All I get is “Operation not permitted”
I went up a folder and specified the actual folder/mount point using sudo and I got the same thing. I tried also using:
sudo chown -R 1000:1002 .
Which should change the folder I’m in and all other files/folders recursively and that gets the same error. This all worked the other day, now it isn’t. I’ve also tried it with the actual username:group rather than the numerical IDs with no luck on that either.
To make it even more strange, several - but not all - of the folders/drives that I setup and successfully changed the ownership/group two days ago, some are now owned by root:root again, and I also can’t change the ownership of these either. I’m getting the same error “Operation not permitted”.
Why did this work the other day but not today? I’ve not made any changes to the drives/folder/data. I’m really discouraged. It’s taking forever and I just keep running into one problem after another. Please understand I’m not blaming the distro (I actually love it) or anything else on this, it is what it is. But it doesn’t make it any less discouraging or frustrating. I’ve read so many different sites searching for an answer but cannot sus it out. Please, any help would be so appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Hi
Normally the mount point is in control by root:root, files/folders under the mount point can be owned by users etc. Did you edit the mount point to allow for the user group to own the mountpoint, eg defaults,users?
I wonder if it is a Windows created NTFS file system - you cannot change ownership of those - but you can copy them to Linux and then change ownership.
You have a long, long story, but almost no facts. Please show what you do. Copy/paste that chown command and it’s output between CODE tags in your posts,so we can see what you saw and you do not have to type a long story about what think you saw.
It seems that, you plugged a USB stick – or, something similar – into a USB port. Please correct this statement if it’s incorrect
… 1. The normal path for the mount point is ‘/run/media/«User name
»/«Device Identifier»’ – I suspect that, you mistyped the path string … 1. The “automatic mount
” process you mentioned is probably the service offered by your graphical desktop environment (GUI) – which you’ve setup to mount devices automatically when they’re plugged in. Please correct me if I’m wrong … 1. If you had taken a look at the results of the “mount” CLI command, you may well have noticed that, the filesystem of the device which you plugged into the USB port is in fact either “FAT32” or “VFAT” or “exFAT”. Please correct me if I’m wrong
… 1. All of these filesystems are MS Windows filesystems and, MS Windows has absolutely no concept of owner or user group – not exactly true – at a system level within a network managed by Microsoft’s User Management system, the user’s are known and grouped but, this doesn’t apply to the filesystem level …
You no doubt noticed that, from a CLI terminal, all the files (and the special files which are directories
) below ‘/run/media/«User name»/«Device Identifier»’ are owned by the User Name and User Group of the User logged into the GUI …
[HR][/HR]The bottom line is, for such devices, the files below the mount point have the nominal ownership and group of the user who had logged into the GUI.
If that very same device, were to be mounted from another user’s GUI, the files would be displayed as being owned by THAT user (and group).
Therefore, attempting to change file ownerships on such devices is pointless – the filesystem on these devices has absolutely no concept of file ownership …