Home partition shared between Debian & MS WinXP
I have Debian Lenny & MS Windows XP SP2 installed on different
partitions of my hdd.
There are my partitions today:
device: mount point: fs type: options:
/dev/hda3 / reiserfs (rw,notail) // for Debian system
/dev/hda8 /home/ ext3 (rw,usrquota,grpquota) // for users'
own files (user1/), shared files (docs, websites, music, films)
/dev/hda4 /usr/local/ ext3 (rw)
/dev/hda1 /mnt/win/ ntfs (rw,nls=utf8)
/dev/hda5 /mnt/winhome/ ntfs (rw,nls=utf8)
/dev/hda6 /mnt/buffer/ vfat (rw)
I use /home/ partition for users' own files (on /home/anthony/,
/home/galina/, /home/victor/ subdirectories) and shared files (docs,
websites, music, films) on /home/pub/ subdirectory. Last can be
potentially shared to other computers in the network using ftp/http/smb.
Regrettably, for some reasons, I need to use MS Windows sometimes.
Moreover, some users of my computer don't like Unix.
For reliability, I put "My Documents" folders of MS Windows filesystem
on a separate partition (mounted to /mnt/winhome/ on Debian). There is
how I have done that:
/dev/hda5 partition (/mnt/winhome/ in Debian) is mounted to "c:\home" in
Windows. It has "c:\home\mydoc" subdir that has "anthony", "galina" &
"victor" subdirs. "C:\Documents and Settings\anthony\My Documents" is a
junction point (symlink) to "c:\home\mydoc\anthony", similarly for other
users.
But it is very inconvenient (in multi-OS system) because:
1) I need to have 2 copies of files (on Linux & Windows home partitions).
2) I need to synchronize data between OSes.
3) Only root has access to /mnt/winhome/ partition (NTFS's native
permissions aren't used under Debian).
I want to share /home/ partition between both OSes. For example, my
projects will be in /home/anthony/projects/ dir which will be symlinked
to "C:\Documents and Settings\anthony\My Documents\projects" folder.
What is the most right way to do that?
[solution 1] /home/ partition is Ext3. All Ext3-drivers for Windows
don't support access rights so that all files from /home/ partitions
will be accessible to all users under Windows (or to administrators
only). Moreover, such drivers don't support journaling and symlinks.
Additionally I will need to use drive letters (such as c:, d:, e: etc.)
but I hate them.
[solution 2] /home/ partition is NTFS. www.ntfs-3g.org says that ntfs-3g
Linux read/write driver supports ownership/permissions under Linux
(using mapping of users). Unfortunately (as I know) Debian-Installer
doesn't support ntfs-partition mounting (to /home/). Additionally I will
need to configure user mappings after D-I in order to access users' file
by ordinary user). Also I'm afraid of law speed of this ntfs-3g driver.
Do I need to install "ntfs-3g" package and change "ntfs" type to
"ntfs-3g" in order to use this driver (my current driver also supports
read/write)? What is www.linux-ntfs.org project and how it pertains to
ntfs-3g?
What solution is better or are there any other good solutions?
Reply to: