Originally Posted By: wavinwayne
Thanks. That is interesting info. I'm not sure what all of it means, but I will do my research and chew on it for a while. Thanks again.
Sorry, wavinwayne - You never know who knows what and to what level of technicality you should go to when explaining something. I'll try to be clearer:
1) By "permissions issues" I meant that the partition on the HFS hard drive may (hypothetically) have the following permissions:
ADMINISTRATOR (or ROOT): read + write
USER: read-only
GROUP: read-only
If you are trying to write to the drive as a USER and not ROOT, then the partition is only read-only for you. Additionally, even is the USER had write permissions, if the USER is a user that is NOT you (ie. the USER that has write permissions is "johndoe" and you're "wavinwayne"), you're still snookered. Permissions on a UNIX-style OS are per file and per folder in addition to the partition itself.
Using the Ubuntu Live CD will enable you to stick your grubby little hands into a HFS or NTFS partition and begin messing around with permissions; but be mindful that doing so *will* impact the partition (usually disastrously) when it once again becomes accessed by it's native OS!
2) Journaling is when a filesystem that... it... Well, I'll let Wikipedia explain it:
Quote:
A journaling file system is a file system that keeps track of the changes it intends to make in a journal (usually a circular log in a dedicated area of the file system) before committing them to the main file system. In the event of a system crash or power failure, such file systems are quicker to bring back online and less likely to become corrupted.
... And sometimes when you're accessing a filesystem that is not native to your own OS (accessing Linux's ext3 or 4 from Windows/ NTFS or Mac/ HFS or any other combination of those three) you do NOT get the journaling capabilities built into the filesystem you're trying to access. *This may not even be the case anymore, though*, as the last time I researched this at all was when I was having some trouble similar to yours a few years ago: For all I know, the newest implementations of filesystems in the varying kernels of the varying OS's we're talking about may well make use of journaling on non-native filesystems. I dunno.
3) When a package is available for a Debian system, it is usually available; either unmodified or slightly tweaked by Ubuntu developers, in Ubuntu. Debian is a massive, world-wide project where developers compile source code for over 30,000 pieces of software and work very hard and for very long periods of time crafting it together to form and unbelievably stable operating system. Then, they license that system so that you can bugger with it a bit and call it your own, which is exactly what Ubuntu is. So it is often a safe assumption to say that if it works on Debian, it'll work on Ubuntu, even though it cannot always be said to work the other way. The Ubuntu developers have taken to adding bits and pieces of stuff on top of the Debian core system that are not backward compatible with Debian and other Debian-based OS's.
