Brand new to Linux need a little help

Again sorry messing up so much with this, as a windows user since Win95 the way Linux works and behaves along with its file system is completely alien but you gotta walk before you can run.

Right firstly I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to give me advice this far.
@vlkon I do feel its better to make a /drives/games structure… should have been obvious tbh :thinking:
But I just want to make sure I understand this correctly since I know I keep looking at it as a windows user.
Endeavour fresh install + only drive is the 2TB SSD which was erased before install and is currently not formatted.

  1. using the GUI I have no permissions in root or anywhere, I know I only have full permissions in /home. So the “proper” way according to Archlinux wiki is to crate such file by sudo mkdir /drives/games ?

  2. Using KDE partition manager I format the drive to ext4 and that is it (no mount path or anything)
    Then I mount the drive using sudo mount -U UUID /drives/games
    –at this moment the drive should be mounted but I have no permissions to do anything with it–

  3. Open sudo nano /etc/fstab and add my 2TB SSD using its UUID and ending it with 0 2 .Should I now have proper permissions on this drive or is there more I need to do for it ??

As for removable drives… I have a dock that and use two drives via USB-3, I have 10 hard drives that I use as backup/storage so if there is a way i can just plug a drive in…drag and drop files then remove the drive that would be ideal. Or do I have to configure every single drive ?

I have been looking at the guide on here in regards to USB since I have… many https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB_storage_devices#Mounting_USB_memory

If you’re using KDE Partition Manager, you can just right click the partition and “edit mount point” and set the path there. Pressing “OK” should write that to your FSTAB.

As for permissions, try a nice sudo chown [user]:[user] /path/to/mountpoint

I always mount my secondary drive (steam games and a persistent /home/me/documents etc) to /mnt/LinuxData and then chown /mnt/LinuxData, otherwise it’s mostly inaccessible.

As for removable drives, like thumbsticks, etc. you should be able to just plug them in. Most DE’s will automount them to /run/media or something like that and they will show up in the sidebar of your file manager. You shouldn’t have to manually set up mount points for each one.

@Dougie is spot on with the permissions command. If you are not using KDE then gparted does the same thing. If you don’t have either installed then one or the other would be good.

Thanks for answering so quickly @Dougie , the reason I ask for terminal options is because all guides about Linux give instructions to use in the terminal to do things.
Of using KDE partition manager is easier but its good to know how to do things when needed.
Also sadly doing sudo chown [user]:[user] /Drives/Games didn’t change the permissions for me. I even tried opening terminal inside the drive and just doing sudo chown [user]:[user]
after checking with ls -lb I got this - drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jul 27 18:29

So not sure what to do to get permissions. :confused:

sudo chown (your stuff) -R /Drives/Games. Remember that Linux is case sensitive eg capitals and lower case matter.

Honestly I’m not sure why it wouldn’t have worked. You didn’t literally use [user]:[user] did you? You’re supposed to use your username on both sides of the colon.

As wordler said, a recursive -R could help and everything is case sensitive.

Yep recursive could be the issue.

@Dougie lol no I used my actual username XD and yes @wordler was correct adding -R fixed it and now its working as intended.
Sadly my external drives are proving less cooperative. I changed the system settings to allow automatic mounting of external devices which has worked when i insert a drive into the dock… but none of them have permissions either… do I need to chown all 10 drives or something ?

That’s a sh** load of drives but yes you probably do! Man you do create a mess! :laughing:

That would be a real pain. Where are they being automounted? You could chown that directory maybe (might not be the best solution!) :upside_down_face:

Could be a solution, not sure but makes sense with my limited knowledge.

Well @wordler and @Dougie I tried two drives in the dock together both drives have mounted themselves to /run/media/user/[there own label]. One is formatted to ext4 while the other is NTFS…only the ext4 HDD doesn’t give me permissions. NTFS did not resist, kind of wondering if formatting my drives into ext4 is changing permissions or something.

ntfs/fat32/exfat and friends don’t support POSIX permissions so they get mounted with fixed permissions.

Reformatting a drive will definitely reset the permissions on it. After reformatting it you need to chown it but you should only need to do that once.

1 Like

@dalto so just to be sure It should look like this
sudo chown (user) -R /run/media/user/[there own label]

and i will need to do this for every drive I own, and should I take them to another PC running linux or I mess up and require a reinstall I will need to do it all over again ?

I hadn’t realized your external drives were ext4 as well. I guess it makes sense given the issue lol.
I usually keep my externals as exfat or ntfs because I’ve used them on Windows machines.

Well, part of your reformatting process should be to set permissions. Hopefully that isn’t something you do on a regular basis. There are alternatives but they are more complicated.

As for reinstalling, as long as your UID/GID doesn’t change, your permissions will stay intact.

@Dougie and @dalto Is there any issues I should know about when it comes to NTFS drives with Linux at all ?
Like you pointed out NTFS doesn’t support POSIX permissions so it seams more preferable for a external drive which is just backups of all my stuff (files and games).

If so I may just leave all my drives in NTFS tbh… of course that would bring an end to my mounting problems…now id be looking at installing Wine and how to make it install games on my game drive and not in /.wine.

I have heard that NTFS support can be… “spotty” at times but personally I’ve never had any issues.
My Steam drive used to be automounted NTFS (since I used it when I had Windows) and I used it like that for a good while with no issues, but I decided that since it was an internal drive it should be a native filesystem and formatted it.

It’s up to you. I’d say that for important / frequently accessed data use ext4 and for long term storage use NTFS. Just my opinion though, no expert.

The big issues are:

  • No POSIX permissions means that things that rely on those permissions won’t work. Further, it means the system can’t properly secure things in those volumes
  • ntfs is case insensative so things which rely on case sensitivity will break
  • Performance(on linux), will suffer compared to ext4

If you are just using them to store data such as pictures/videos/music it is probably fine. For anything else, you should really pick a filesystem that supports permissions.

1 Like

Yea all these drives are strictly storage/backup for I don’t think there should be a problem, just files/pictures/videos/music and games.

Also @dalto & everyone else, still on the topic of drives and how Linux works. I know that Wine creates a virtual dive_C to install windows apps/games. Of course I want all games to install on my 2TB SSD and not my Nvme. can I move the drive_C it makes or is it easier in winecfg to tell it to see my SSD as drive_D or something instead ?