[Bug 23230] Re: Browsing as root from disks manager

[Michael Kofler]

I have tested Ubuntu 6.06 flight 6 and was quite dissapointed as nothing has changed

status quo: as a non-root user, I see icons for all windows partition on my desktop; however, clicking on a NTFS icon gives an error (no rights to see contents); clicking on a FAT icon gives only read access; file names with none-ASCII characters (such as äöü) are displayed wrong because of encoding problems (latin1/ANSI --> utf8)

to be able to write into FAT partitions or to read NTFS partitions I have to use the disk manager; it runs with root privileges; its 'Browse' button starts Nautilus with root privileges; and opening any document from within Nautilus starts the program (i.e. OpenOffice, Gimp etc.) also with root privileges

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what needs to be done to make access to Windows partitions easier (at least from my point of view):

(1) change /etc/fstab during installation so everyone (or at least the first ubuntu user) may read NTFS partitions and everyone (or at least the first ubuntu user) may write FAT partitions; also add options for the correct characterset for FAT partitions 

/dev/hda1 /media/hda1 vfat umask=0,utf8 0 0  
/dev/hda2 /media/hda2 ntfs umask=0,utf8 0 0

or

/dev/hda1 /media/hda1 vfat uid=1000,gid=1000,utf8 0 0  
/dev/hda2 /media/hda2 ntfs uid=1000,gid=1000,utf8 0 0

(2) reduce the disk manager to a pure administration tool and get rid of the 'Browse' button

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a final note for Dapper+1: current versions of ntfsmount allow many NTFS *write* operations; Knoppix 5.0 shows how far this already goes; future versions of Ubuntu will also have to include this feature, which will makes the whole setup even more difficult

http://wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfs-en#can_i_write_to_an_ntfs_volume

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Browsing as root from disks manager
https://launchpad.net/bugs/23230