[ale] Debian help requested - vfat question

[Jason Day]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 06:15:25AM -0600, Preston Boyington wrote:
>  I usually use Midnight Commander, but have also used Konqueror.  Both
>  reduce my files to 8.3
> 
>  Haven't tried command line (not currently at my machine) , but I
>  would wager it to be the same.
> 
>  Noticed it when copying to a floppy.

How are you mounting the floppy drive?  Many distributions add a line
to /etc/fstab like this:
   /dev/fd0    /floppy    auto  user,noauto    0 0

The "auto" keyword for fstype tells mount to probe the superblock of the
device and make a guess about its filesystem.  This normally works well
for floppies, but it will almost always pick fat or msdos instead of
vfat, which of course means that you are limited to 8.3 filenames.

According to mount's man page, you can create a file called
/etc/filesystems to change the probe order, but I couldn't find any
documentation on this file (but I didn't look very hard).

What I do is add another mount point for the floppy drive.  My system is
a dual boot, and I'm already mounting my windoze partition in /win/c.  I
just add a line to /etc/fstab like this:
   /dev/fd0    /win/a    vfat  user,noauto    0 0

That way, if I know I want to mount a floppy as vfat, I just "mount
/win/a".  If I want to mount a linux floppy, I "mount /floppy".

HTH,
Jason
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale