Better late than never...
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| helios Oct 03, 2008 4:16 PM EDT |
Herschel...Thank You Sir.
I have been banging on this exact issue since the 7.10 release. In that release, there were relatively few of us who experienced this problem but when the new LTS came out, then it seemed to explode. Now look...I've been branded by more than one as an "Ubuntu Hater." There's nothing more mouthy than a fanboi who feels you've dissed his d'stro. That is further evidenced by the times I've posted this problem on the Ubuntu forums. fstab has been a moving target since the beginning in Ubuntu. And it's just not me...for a while, every time this issue was raised, it would languish unanswered, even ignored through the many "bumps" and "written throat clearings" in that thread. Now I am going to say that I believe this is squarely an Ubuntu problem. I am currently typing this on the new Mepis pre-release/beta/whatever-it's-called and isn't it Debian Based? Rhetorical question folks...of course it is. The problem has not manifested itself in any like form on the live cd or the installed version running (for testing) on two other machines. I will begin testing it on this new Toshiba laptop here in a bit. This problem resides squarely in the Ubuntu camp. I am glad to see Herschel's article getting some play. His article is more of a journey of self discovery than an article it seems...he found the "problem" while writing the article and then changed the course of his writing to reflect it as a "fix" to the problem. Isn't Ubuntu being touted as "new Linux User friendly?" Take a look at the "fix" and tell me how many new users are going to mess with that before they go running and screamikng back to Windows. Maybe not all of them, but enough of them to make a difference. Maybe now they will deal with this... Probably not... They still have the same Intel 845/945 bug in 8.10 that was there in 6.06... Now the real question has to be asked... Would bugs like this have such long tails if they resided in a proprietary distro? We'll just have to see what kind of longevity this "issue" in fstab has before it's corrected... Or touted as a feature. h |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 03, 2008 4:22 PM EDT |
This is definitely NOT in Debian, that I know for sure. And I wish I understood how to deal with the problem ... this didn't help me as much as I'd hoped. |
| azerthoth Oct 03, 2008 4:36 PM EDT |
Do like I have done, forswear use of distro's that perpetually give you problems. I have 2 on my never again list, well actually one, I have said that when Ubuntu releases 'Perverted Penguin' I'll take another look at it, but not until then. For some reason if Ubuntu is going to have some strange hardware bug that no other version of Linux has, it hits my hardware, regardless of the fact that I have tried it on multiple machines with differing configurations. The other, I hate to say (no I dont) is PCLinuxOS. Not for technical reasons, but because of their forum moderators. Regardless PCLOS brought nothing to the table that Mandriva didn't have already, and Mandriva was/is definitely the more polished of the two that last I compared. I don't hate either distribution. They have their place and their proponents who swear by them. For me, though I have, like Windows, no use for them at all. Got sidetracked I think, moral of the story, a distro that continually fails you, regardless of hype, is one that you can personally ignore. Maybe give it a few years, or maybe never again. But if you keep going back to the same thing, and receive the same result ... whose fault is that? |
| rijelkentaurus Oct 03, 2008 4:59 PM EDT |
God help you if you ask "When is the next version coming out" on the PCLOS forums. They'll ban you, hunt you down, cook you and make BBQ out of you. |
| jdixon Oct 03, 2008 5:04 PM EDT |
> And I wish I understood how to deal with the problem... So you can't mount fixed drives under /media in Ubuntu 8.04, but have to use /mnt? Bizarre. Not that I particularly like /media, but there's no reason you shouldn't be able to use it if you want. I assume Ubuntu is setting the permissions somehow so that it's only available to the automount services used for removable devices and CD/DVD's. |
| jdixon Oct 03, 2008 5:07 PM EDT |
> They'll ban you, hunt you down, cook you and make BBQ out of you. That's pretty bad. I'd make lousy BBQ. Even the Slackware forums only reiterated "when it's ready" at you. And they're not exactly know for their politeness level. |
| helios Oct 03, 2008 5:13 PM EDT |
Hey Az... Been a while man.... Both you and Steve bring good points here. Look...here's my beef with the Buntu's. For whatever reason, and it sure hasn't been mainstream marketing, Ubuntu has become the defacto distribution for new Linux Users. Regardless of what is out there that's better, Ubuntu seems to get the play. That's fine... If it works at least as well as Windows. And to this point, it doesn't. I don't want to turn this into a Ubuntu vs. the world fistfight, but I've been saying for two years...If you are going to BE number one, your product needs to reflect that level of competence and reliability. We've more to lose here than New Linux Users... If you care to argue the point with me, review the EULA in Vista/XP and then go take a long, sober look at the DMCA of 1998. I happen to be a student of that document and I'm telling you, some of the language between the above-mentioned documents were considered strongly in any sub.sequent re-write/amendment of the other. You think that's a coincidence? Given the shenanigans on my nation's wall street, I would be sharply inclined to say no. Hell, even a fairly well-read poodle would have to see the positive correlations. So what does this have to do with some nasty glitch in Ubuntu's file system reporting? Coupling this immediate problem with the one's it already experiences, prospective converts are simply not going to jump through any text file configurations to make Linux do what Windows does without even thinking about it. These users don't care about our philosophies or politics folks...they just want their computers to work within a reasonable expectation... When the number one-rated Linux Distro fails to provide that simple thing, then we aren't likely to see them come back. We Can't afford to lose many more to lazy coding or a developer's bad attitude. Ubuntu had done many things right, and their braintrust is staggering...they stand to revolutionize the Linux Operating System. But they are not going to do it by allowing seemingly small, niggling problems like this to multiply. Now: For Sale - one well used soap box..... h |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 04, 2008 12:06 AM EDT |
All I know is that changing your partition layout after a Ubuntu installation makes bad things happen. I'd love to know exactly (and hopefully easily) how to re-create a clean Ubuntu fstab after changing partitions. |
| herzeleid Oct 04, 2008 1:42 PM EDT |
OK, I'm scratching my head here. Where's the beef? I Just looked at /etc/fstab on my ubuntu server, and I see a nicely commented file. It does specify filesystems by UUID rather than device name, but that's no biggie, I've sen it before as suse does it the same way. On either distro, I can change fstab to specify filesystems by device name, which makes more sense to me on a small system with one disk. Re /media: all the distros I've used lately use /media as the mount point for automatically mounted devices. You really don't want to manually mount stuff there, unless you enjoy fighting with udev and frustrating yourself. Could it be a case of someone trying to force things, when he should just relax, go with the flow, and take the defaults? |
| helios Oct 04, 2008 4:01 PM EDT |
herzeleid We despise change. We as human beings. We all stay with what we know long after it's advantageous for us to do so...ask any Windows User with a hundred viruses on his computer...he'll do anything to keep from changing...but like we've recently learned...there's a point where the pain of learning dwarfs the pain of staying with a broken thing. This issue may not be "broken, but it sure was an unpleasant surprise... I'll be the first to admit...I'm a /mnt/sdwhat_the_frig_ever/ kind of guy. They threw us a nasty splitter in the dirt with /media/ Sure it will work...but what has been alluded to above just made hay on my machine. I am a kde user. There is an Uber-Sweet app called KDE-Guidance that gives you some remarkable gui-fied control over your fstab entries. It has it's bugs...hey, I'm a python guy...it's python-created...trust me, I understand python-bugginess, but in all it does a great job of keeping the help out of the /etc/ files. The first thing I do with an ubuntu install is go in and set the mount points via this gui (as I am demonstrating to my customer) from /media/ to /mnt/ As long as you do ALL your persistent drives that way, you are fine. It gets ugly when passbooks/usb thumbdrives and large-capacity sim cards enter the system. Real ugly. Look, I have every confidence in ubuntu. I just want them to realize this game has went from game to nasty-serious and they represent Linux on most levels, whether I like it or not, and personally, I don't... But I'm an Astro's fan...I live for disappointment. h |
| dinotrac Oct 04, 2008 4:47 PM EDT |
Herzeleid - >It does specify filesystems by UUID rather than device name, Really? Which Suse are you talking about? Just looked in my fstab and I see all kinds of pretty dev names. |
| herzeleid Oct 04, 2008 5:02 PM EDT |
@dino - > Just looked in my fstab and I see all kinds of pretty dev names. When I did the 11.0 install the disk mounting scheme defaulted to UUID, but I changed it to use device name. It was also that way on 10,3 IIRC. Of course, if you upgraded from an existing install with /etc/fstab using device names, the upgrade wouldn't change that to UUIDs. |
| jdixon Oct 04, 2008 9:50 PM EDT |
> Where's the beef? The beef would be that it not only expects you to use /mnt for fixed media and /media for removable media, but that in fact requires you to do so. Expectations are OK, requirements are not so good. Since I prefer using /mnt for most things, and since I don't use Ubuntu anyway, I don't really care one way or the other, but I can see why others (who were used to being able to do things however they wanted) might. |
| herzeleid Oct 04, 2008 11:01 PM EDT |
@jdixon > The beef would be that it expects you to use /mnt for fixed media There is certainly no requirement to do so in ubuntu. (or any other distro I know of). You can create mount points anywhere you like, except under /media, and you can name them /googoofoofoo, /windozesux or /supercalifragilisticexpialodocious if you want - you don't ever have to use /mnt. |
| jdixon Oct 05, 2008 9:27 AM EDT |
> You can create mount points anywhere you like, except under /media... Which isn't "anywhere you like", now is it? As I noted, I don't care. Those who were used to being able to use /media for all their mounting probably do. FWIW, Slackware lets you mount things under /media if you want. |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 05, 2008 10:23 AM EDT |
>> You can create mount points anywhere you like, except under /media... > Which isn't "anywhere you like", now is it? You're fighting your distribution's configuration. If you want to mount under /media manually, disable the automounter or tell it to automount somewhere else. Don't call Ubuntu broken because it uses different defaults than $DISTRO. It's as nonsensical as me saying that PCLinuxOS is "broken" because it doesn't use Gnome as the default desktop environment. There are broken things in Ubuntu, but /media isn't one of them. |
| jdixon Oct 05, 2008 10:32 AM EDT |
> Don't call Ubuntu broken because it uses different defaults than $DISTRO. I call it broken because it doesn't do what the user wants or expected. Something which worked previously no longer does. And apparently it didn't tell him that this was going to be the case. That's the developers' choice, but doing so on a regular basis results in lost users, who switch to a distro which does let them do what they want. |
| azerthoth Oct 05, 2008 11:30 AM EDT |
Have to agree with dix, saying you can have all the access your used to for any file system shenanigans that you might wish to do except for this one specific (the one that label wise actually makes sense to use) directory is asinine. Windows is supposed to be the OS that is smarter than it's user, *nix admits that the user is. Perhaps the udev idiocy can be subverted into acting normally, but I wouldnt care to try. |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 05, 2008 12:58 PM EDT |
Quoting:it doesn't do what the user wants or expected. Something which worked previously no longer does. It works as expected for me. Even the FHS says so. /media is for removable media. /mnt is for sysadmins to use. So, if you use an automounter to manage your removable media for you, then you give up control of /media. It's pretty much like networking. If you use network-manager to manage your network connections for you, then you give up control of /etc/network/interfaces. If you use some GUI tool to manage your displays, you give up control of /etc/X11/xorg.conf. With modern Linux device plumbing you give up control over /dev. |
| azerthoth Oct 05, 2008 1:24 PM EDT |
huh? Using network-manager does not preclude me from also setting up /etc/network/interfaces (if I used a distro that had that), nor does a gui keep me from fine tuning my xorg.conf, many times I actually have to edit that first before GUI apps will do what I want them to in controlling xorg. I wont go as far as saying that this is a one of a kind, but for a major system component it is an only child. Nor is there any viable reason for it, nor excuse for it to act as it does. *edit* Thinking about it, /etc/network/interfaces is actually there so busybox can handle the connections. For any network manager to work, .../interfaces has to be set up to begin with, otherwise nada, bubkiss. |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 05, 2008 2:18 PM EDT |
Quoting:Using network-manager does not preclude me from also setting up /etc/network/interfaces It depends what you do to it. I've been burned a few times when the settings in the interfaces caused a fight between network-manager and the rest of the system over my wireless card. |
| herzeleid Oct 05, 2008 5:07 PM EDT |
>> You can create mount points anywhere you like, except under /media... > Which isn't "anywhere you like", now is it? I dunno, infinity minus 1 is still infinity last I checked, which still gives an awful lot of choices. Plus, If he really, really wants to override the udev defaults, there are ways to go about it. > I call it broken because it doesn't do what the user wants or expected. Something which worked previously no longer does. And apparently it didn't tell him that this was going to be the case. If the user was so averse to change, why didn't he just stick with his 6.06 setup? You really can't blame ubuntu for following the FHS on their 8.04 release. |
| azerthoth Oct 05, 2008 7:49 PM EDT |
It's that minus one that is annoying and unneeded, but hey, it's only one little bit where your operating system insists that it's smarter than you are, not like a Mac or Windows. Or, is this the first of death of a thousand cuts. |
| Sander_Marechal Oct 05, 2008 8:05 PM EDT |
Quoting:it's only one little bit where your operating system insists that it's smarter than you are It's not. Simply tell udev to use a different directory or don't use the automount feature. You can turn it off under Preferences -> Removable media. It's taking control of /media because you asked it to do so by using automounting. It's not being a smart-ass. It's doing what it's told to do. |
| tuxchick Oct 05, 2008 8:32 PM EDT |
It's not changes that drive us crazy- it's keeping them a big secret, and forcing us to wander the Web far and wide to get some answers. Buntu's release notes are still the worst. That's where changes are supposed to be documented. For comparison, check out Debian's and Fedora's release notes. They are comprehensive, detailed, and even include workarounds for known problems. |
| Steven_Rosenber Oct 05, 2008 8:34 PM EDT |
Most Linux distributions do a very poor job with documentation. Gentoo is excellent, but it trails off considerably after that. |
| herzeleid Oct 05, 2008 10:29 PM EDT |
> It's not changes that drive us crazy- it's keeping them a big secret, and forcing us to wander the Web far and wide to get some answers. I never had to wander the web over this. I noticed the /media automounting feature in suse before I ever tried ubuntu hardy heron. I really think this is a tempest in a teapot. The average user, upon finding that the OS automounts stuff under /media, will say "ah, that;s interesting", the noob user won't even notice what's happening, and the experienced user will understand it and know how to change it. It's an odd class of user that doesn't fall into any of these categories, yet has very stubborn ideas about what he wants mounted where. |
| jdixon Oct 06, 2008 12:10 AM EDT |
> You really can't blame ubuntu for following the FHS on their 8.04 release. OK, I just checked. The FHS specifes that the /media directory is for automounting removable devices. It does not say that the user cannot be allowed to mount other devices there, which is what Ubuntu is doing. > Simply tell udev to use a different directory or don't use the automount feature. You shouldn't have to do that. The fact that udev uses the directory for automounting should not mean that you can't also use the directory. Slackware also automounts removable devices under /media. It doesn't prevent you from mounting your own devices there if you want. I don't know of any other distribution that does, though I haven't tested for this "feature" when I've tried them out. > It's an odd class of user that doesn't fall into any of these categories, yet has very stubborn ideas about what he wants mounted where. Probably. But it's their system, not Canonical's. It's their decision to make. |
| krisum Oct 06, 2008 3:58 AM EDT |
Mounting fixed drive partitions under /media works for me on Ubuntu hardy without problems. So has this issue got to do something with policykit authorizations, or is it a bug that manifests under certain settings? |
| jdixon Oct 06, 2008 6:05 AM EDT |
> So has this issue got to do something with policykit authorizations, or is it a bug that manifests under certain settings? No idea. Did you do an upgrade or a clean install? Maybe some other Ubuntu users can help figure it out. |
| krisum Oct 06, 2008 8:21 AM EDT |
upgrade edit: did not find any existing bug in launchpad for this issue; one of those who experience the problem should file a bug report |
| herzeleid Oct 06, 2008 1:49 PM EDT |
> Probably. But it's their system, not Canonical's. It's their decision to make. lulz... Nobody twisted his arm and forced him to upgrade. Ubuntu comes with default settings which most people find useful. If he doesn't like the defaults, he can change them. |
| jdixon Oct 06, 2008 3:02 PM EDT |
> If he doesn't like the defaults, he can change them. Or he can switch to another distro. Which do you think is more likely? |
| herzeleid Oct 06, 2008 3:12 PM EDT |
> > If he doesn't like the defaults, he can change them. > Or he can switch to another distro. Which do you think is more likely? Depends on the user I guess - If it's someone who wants to make a dramatic statement, he'll switch distros. I've used a lot of distros over the years - sls, slackware, caldera, mandrake, redhat, fedora, suse, sles, debian, ubuntu - and no software is perfect, but ubuntu has caused me very little grief, and I'm happy enough with it to use it on the desktop, laptop and server room - YMMV of course. |
| jdixon Oct 06, 2008 3:23 PM EDT |
> ...but ubuntu has caused me very little grief... The one install I've done with it has worked fine too. But that was a desktop install for a user who isn't interested in manually mounting drives. I'd guess this user would probably be better served by another distribution. Of course, it could be a bug, and not intended behavior, in which case he should submit a bug report and see what happens. |
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