On Mon, 2005-05-30 at 01:56 -0700, Prasad H.L. wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using Fedora Core 3.
>
> I've developed a firstboot python module which can
> detect other OS(currently only windows) partitions and
> add entries to the fstab. It also creates a user group
> which has access to those partitions.
>
> The version of firstboot is 1.3.33-2.
>
> I would like to know whether the firstboot developers
> are interested in seeing and using it in future
> releases of Fedora. If so, I'll send the module as an
> E-mail attachment.
I'm pretty sure this is not the right way to tackle the problem. For a
while before FC3 we've actually had HAL/fstab-sync add these
automatically upon every boot. It worked great for all file systems that
hal knows about (vfat, ntfs, ext3, reiserfs, hfs, hfs+, xfs, ...) and it
was really usable. It worked great both on my Mac and x86 laptops which
dual booted with other operating systems.
However, we disabled it because there are the following risks:
a) sometimes we could pick up an ataraid physical volume and mistake it
for a real partition with e.g. vfat filesystem (supposed it was one
of the PV's for a mirror), add it to the /etc/fstab and have it
automounted and then we would risk data corruption. This never
happened though (e.g. no bug was filed), but I didn't want to run
the risk...
b) Auto-mounting ext3 filesystems is dangerous since with FC3 and
forward because we write extended attributes on ext3 which might
panic older 2.4 kernels.
(but note that at least all supported Red Hat distros with 2.4 have
got kernel updates to cope with this; still vocal users complained
when in fact they should just have kept their systems upgraded)
What I want to do for FC5 is to have a gconf setting that can be toggled
whether we should automount and display such drives in computer:/// in
Nautilus. Whether this should option will be in the Nautilus or
gnome-volume-manager preferences is another question.
Another option is to set this preference in the installer: if you're
installing a "Personal Desktop" set it to TRUE, if you're installing a
server FALSE. We may also ask the question in firstboot though this is a
bad idea as most target users won't understand the question.
Hope this helps,
David
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
