[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#501339: automounting vfat as utf8

[Eric Doviak]

Hi Sune, 

I'm writing in regard to the very old -- but very important -- bug about case-sensitive automounting of FAT-formatted devices.

My main purpose in writing is to attract a little attention to this bug. A second purpose is to describe a workaround that spares the life of users' USB flash-drives. 


I've noticed that placing the following line in my /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sda1       /media/sda1     auto    rw,user,noauto,exec  0       0

and running:

mkdir /media/sda1

mounts a FAT-formatted USB flash drive case-insensitive:


[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.29 eric ] ~ $ mount /dev/sda1
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] ~ $ mount
...
/dev/sda1 on /media/sda1 type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=eric)
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] ~ $
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] ~ $ cd /media/sda1
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] sda1 $
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] sda1 $ echo hello > hello.txt
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] sda1 $ echo hello > Hello.txt
bash: Hello.txt: File exists
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] sda1 $
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.30 eric ] sda1 $ ls -l
total 12
-rwxr-xr-x 1 eric eric    6 2009-09-11 11:30 hello.txt
...
[ Fri 11-Sep-2009 11.31 eric ] sda1 $  


In regard to the KDE question (i.e. automounting a USB drive upon insertion) ... 

The /etc/fstab line above does not prevent automounting. The difference is that the /etc/fstab line above will mount the device case insensitive.

Have a great weekend,
- Eric