[buug] Excellent Newbie Linux Site

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Zeke Krahlin (ezekielk at netzero.net):

> I also have the experience of Netscape causing the entire system
> to freeze...which then forces me to do a cold reboot.

_If_ you've exhausted all the ways to get to a usable shell, then by a 
functional definition the system is frozen.  But, I have a feeling you
weren't familiar with some.
 
> I found the answer: I was experimenting with "chmod" in both a
> native Linux partition, and on a DOS partition. It is the DOS
> partition, where I get no changes that I requested...even though
> it is not mounted as "read-only"...at least, not as root.

Ah.  Well, you see, a "DOS" (FAT) partition lacks anywhere to put 
ownership and permission information, so a default gets applied at
the time of mounting.  You can specify/override the default rights mask
and ownership as options to the mount command (or, therefore, in
/etc/fstab).  The usual sort of cryptic details can be found in the
"mount" manpage.  ;->

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