Wow, those auto-generated mount points are dizzying!
That is not quite accurate. I mount stuff permanently in /mnt
all the time, you just make your own directory (named whatever you like) inside of /mnt
. The command to make a new directory is mkdir
, so if you want to make a directory for, let’s say, your blue flash drive you can do:
sudo mkdir /mnt/blueflashdrive
You have to run the command elevated (sudo) because all directories “above” /home
in the directory tree are system files owned by root. To change ownership of your new folder to yourself, run chown
(short for “change ownership”, I’m guessing). The syntax is chown [OPTIONS] USER[:GROUP] FILE(s)
:
sudo chown -R catalin:catalin /mnt/blueflashdrive
-R
is recursive, so the permission trickles down to anything you put inside. catalin
I put for the username and group name, obviously yours might be different on your computer but you probably do have a group named after yourself like this by default.
Finally you mount the drive. Let’s say for this example the blue flash drive is sdb1:
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/blueflashdrive
I know this seems like a lot at first, but once you get the hang of it it will be worth it. Your lsblk
output is frankly a mess–I would find it very difficult to keep it straight.
This might be the crux of the issue right here. NTFS is compatible with Linux, but requires some extra finagling to work correctly. One example is for some reason when you mount an NTFS drive it defaults to being very locked down permission-wise. This can even be true if you made your own directory and changed ownership to yourself, like in the example above.
I personally don’t have that much experience mounting NTFS drives in Linux, but here is what a quick search turned up:
When you mount NTFS, you can set the file permissions - not at file level.
sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,auto,user,fmask=0133,dmask=0000 /dev/whatever /mnt/whatever
If you put a correct line in /etc/fstab, you can do GUI totally.
dmask is for directory mask (777 - mask), fmask is for file mask (now 0777-0133 = 0644).
Meaning of numbers are:0(special NTFS does not use IMO)
6(Owner rihts)
4(group right)
4(anybody else rights).
Meaning of digits: (you have to add these together to have multiple rights)4 - read right
2 - write right
1 - execute right
Directories has to be executalble to able to enter it.
So our example from above would turn into this:
sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,auto,user,fmask=0133,dmask=0000 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/blueflashdrive
The explanation above continues here.
My guess is the gnome-disk-utility, in addition to making incomprehensible mount point names, is not doing all this extra stuff with the special permission masks. I don’t know the story with that, but I do see gnome disk utility is a wrapper for udisks, which is supposed to be able to properly mount NTFS if you have ntfs-3g installed. Do you?
sudo pacman -S ntfs-3g