Hello everyone, and thanks for all the help.
I was actually getting confused with all the things I had read on line
and tried, so I went back to first principles.
I had actually both shared folders (VMWare) and an auto mount (Linux)
set up up.
I deleted everything and started again. I found the hared folders
(VMWare) was not working for some reason, but the auto mount(Linux).
Everything is working fine, although I'm disappointing that the Shared
folders were not working.
Still, everything is working how it should now.
Thanks for everything.
Louise.
On 2026-02-23 1:44 p.m., Mark Bourne wrote:
Louise wrote:
I think this might be "programmers" question rather than a GnuCash
question.
I have an existing Windows 10 system, but I am trialing Linux mint
22.3 in a VMWare virtual machine. I am looking at droppingW10 when
I'm happy with Linux. So far so good but I have an issue with GnuCash.
My data is still on the Windows drive. I have set up an auto mount
for launch. I can access the data on the windows share, but GnuCash
wont let me save changes back to the windows share.
This is the message:
[Attached image shows "GnuCash could not write to
/media/windows/data/Documents/Finances/Accounts and
Budgets/GnuCash/2026 Accounts.gnucash. That database may be on a
read-only file system, you may not have write permission for the
directory or your anti-virus software is preventing this action."]
Can you create new files in the shared folder?
I don't use GnuCash in a VM but, with other applications running on an
Ubuntu Linux guest under VirtualBox on a Windows host, I have found
that files can be created in a shared folder on the Linux guest but
then can't be modified, giving a message implying the file is
read-only. Although my experience is with VirtualBox, it could be that
something similar can happen with VMware (presumably Workstation?). I
don't know what the cause of the problem is; perhaps some process on
the Windows host (maybe antivirus or other security software) holds a
handle on the file so that it can't be opened for writing.
I set permissions to 777, But when I look at the accounts file, I
have read/write, my group only has read-only.
What should the permissions be, and what would be the best way to set
them properly.
The underlying filesystem mounted at /media/windows/ (or maybe
/media/windows/data/ is the mount point) in the VM is still a Windows
filesystem, where permissions work very differently than on Linux.
You probably can't reliably change permissions from the Linux guest.
I'm not sure offhand how shared folders work with VMware. With
VirtualBox, a "Guest Additions" package needs to be installed in the
guest. Folders shared from the host are then mounted under /media/ as
being owned by root but with a "vboxsf" group having read/write
permissions (and no access for other users). The user account in the
guest needs to be added to that vboxsf group to be able to access the
folder at all.
Still on VirtualBox, there's an option when setting up a shared folder
in the VM settings to specify whether the folder is read-only or
read/write within the guest. Is there a similar option in VMware? Is
it set to read/write? On VirtualBox, the directory in the guest still
appears to have write permission for the vboxsf group, but attempting
to write to it fails with a "read-only file system" error. Perhaps
VMware more accurately reflects that via the group write bit if the
share is configured to be read-only, so check in VMware that the share
is configured to be writeable.
Do the files/directories appear as owned by the user you're logged in
as within the guest, and does that user have write permissions? If
so, you should be fine as far as the emulated Linux permissions go
even if the group doesn't have write permission. However, the
filesystem still might not actually allow writes (which is what seems
to happen in my case with VirtualBox).
Not sure how much any of that will help, given I have little
experience of VMware Workstation, but perhaps it will give some ideas
of things to look for...
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