On Friday 29 June 2001 20:16, you wrote:
> On Friday 29 June 2001 16:25, you wrote:
> > The reason is that for sane operation Win4Lin relies on some read-only
> > shared files really being read-only and thus staying uncorrupted.
> > In the early days when we were just getting Windows support implemented,
> > if we ran Windows as root, it would occasionally write to one of these
> > files it was not supposed to be writing to and thus causing odd and
> > hard-to-diagnose problems. So it is very important to enforce the
> > UNIX/Linux file permissions when Windows has access to your filesystem.
>
> David,
>
David
> Thank you for a lucid explanation of why Netraverse has chosen to enforce
> the no root operation. I did not realize the windows spaghetti code wasn't
> smart enough to protect itself from itself. I will rethink my win4lin modus
> operandi and come up with a another solution I can live with without mass
> duplication of data on my hard drive. I have already attempted linking
> files via the \mydata link to Linux to mixed reviews when operating in a
> bi-directional mode. Unilateral mode works well.
David et al,
Here is my solution to the win4lin as root problem with respect to my
operating as "user/superuser":
Recall, I am using SuSE7.1 with 2.4.0 Kernel and a parallel port Iomega 250
Mb Zip Drive, and prefer operation as a superuser.
By entering the following in the /etc/fstab file, the zip drive is operable
under win4lin (user):
/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip250.0 auto user,defaults,noauto
Please read the rationale for the above.
For some reason, iomega expects the SCSI address to be sda4 instead of sda
which I was attempting to use. Also, in my system the mount point is
/mnt/zip250.0, "auto" allows either zip msdos or ext2 files to be
read/write, "user" allows all to use, "defaults" are satisfactory, and
"noauto" is absolutely necessary to get the system to boot because at boot
there is No sda4 partition. By the way, Iomega assigns zip drives as 250.0,
250.1, etc according to how many zip drives one has on your system. That
also screwed me up until I figured that out.
Having done the above, the standard "mount /dev/sda4 and umount
/dev/sda4" commands will work for all users.
Now to make win4lin to do what I want when I am a superuser. If you plan to
use the zip drive while in win4lin, issue the "mount /dev/sda4" command
BEFORE starting win4lin if you have not already done so. To launch win4lin
under the superuser desktop it is necessary to either make a batch file (as I
decided to do), or issue the following two commands at a xconsole command
prompt: su "your user name". Next, also at the xconsole prompt enter "fwin
&". This changes the mode from superuser to whatever your user defaults are
for this window only and you will not be asked for a password since you are
requesting lower priviledges than root. This launches another xwindow server
for win4lin's exclusive use. Since win4lin occupies your entire screen, the
Control+Alt+F7 and Control+Alt+F8 combination allows you to switch back and
forth between your Linux desktop and win4lin. The switching back and forth
between windows is not as fast as running win4lin from the standard win4lin
recommendation of "non-root", but with my 400 Mhz system is very acceptable.
Finally, to see if you got it right, open a program such as "Notepad"""",
select "open", click and select "My Documents", click on the entry which
reads "/mnt/zip2500(E)". Yours may not be "E", but some other available
drive letter. It doesn't matter because you are selecting the entire phrase
anyway. You will now be reading the contents of whatever disk is mounted in
your zip drive. This is also the address you will select when saving a file
to the zip drive.
I hope this is useful to others. There is probably a cleaner way to do this
but as I have stated I'm a Physicist not a programmer.
Thanks to those who provided valuable feedback on the subject and therefore
provided the insight required for this solution.
Harry
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