sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

macbox · 2008-01-01 21:26:24

I followed the macbook installation wiki for arch and I'm impressed. I don't think I've seen a more thorough guide for anything. It's made installing arch easy, which says a lot for me.

In spite of that, I'm having trouble with the uid syncronization. I changed the uid & gid values to 1000, but I was no longer had permission to open terminal or do much of anything.

macbox · 2008-01-01 21:45:40

ok, perhaps this will help. how important is it that I set gid & uid values to 1000? I haven't created any users yet in arch, b/c I don't know how to change those values. however, as root I have read/write access to /home and in osx I have r/w access.

should I just create a user and see if it works?

macbox · 2008-01-01 22:31:56

I created a user in arch and I sort of have rw privileges to that user's /home folder in osx. Everytime I try and write to that folder in osx I have to type in my osx user password, which doesn't make sense at all. Also, I can only write to it in finder because of that (ie if i try and save a document in word i don't have write access to the folder, but I can save a doc in a separate folder and move it there...with a password). Anyway, if someone could help me out here I'd appreciate it.

abstracity · 2008-01-03 00:12:09

I am so glad you found the wiki helpful! I had re-wrote the Partitioning and Installation sections to make it very easy, and I apologize that I never got to finish the "UID Synchronization" section and go into as much detail as I had wanted to.

Anyways, I remember the first time I tried to dual boot and not being able to open up "Terminal" after changing the UIDs and GIDs to 1000, but was able to do so after I changed the owner and belonged-group of my user's home folder (in OS X) and all the files within it. Are you sure you followed the next step in the wiki? the one indicated for "All versions?"

All versions:
Open up "Terminal" in the /Applications/Utilities folder.
Enter the following command to reclaim the permission settings of your home folder, replacing <your user name> and <your user group> with the user name whose UID and GID values you just changed and the group name whose GID value you just changed, respectively.
chown -R <your user name>:<your user group> /Users/<your user name>/

The command:

chown -R <your user name>:<your user group> /Users/<your user name>/

may be just the thing you need. For example, if your user name is "macbox" then the command will look like this:

chown -R macbox:macbox /Users/macbox/

I was thinking that the section may be skipped and overlooked due to there already being "Pre-Leopard" and "Leopard" sections. If this is the case, then I will change the article immediately to enforce this clarification.

EDIT: If you are unable to open up OS X's "Terminal" application in order to run the above command, then you can either boot into the OS X Installation Disk, or simply change the permissions from Arch. With the partition mounted in Arch under, let's say, /mnt/sda3, this modified command would do just fine:

chown -R <your user name>.<your user group> /mnt/sda3/Users/<your user name>/

Following the "macbox" example from above, the command would look like:

chown -R macbox.macbox /mnt/sda3/Users/macbox/

And one more quick note, if you were wondering how to change the UIDs and GIDs of an already-created Arch user account along with the GID of the user's group account in Arch, in order to match the default ones in OS X, the following two commands (run as root) would be the ones you want (I am using the "macbox" example again):

usermod -u 501 -g 501 macbox
groupmod -g 501 macbox

But if you were to do that right now, then you would have to go back into OS X and change the UIDs and GIDs of that user account along with the group account to 501, eek! If you had not created a user account in Arch yet, you could use the following command to set up a new user account while also setting the UID and GID of that account to 501:

useradd -u 501 -g 501 -s /bin/bash -m macbox

Sorry again for all the confusion!

Last edited by abstracity (2008-01-03 00:56:41)

macbox · 2008-01-03 14:09:21

thanks abstracity. it took me a minute to realize that the "all versions" part was something of a step two, but after I realized it, that's when I had trouble opening terminal.

anyway, i used your second suggestion and created a user in arch and changed the uid and gid's there. thanks.

macbox · 2008-01-03 14:16:07

oh! there's one other thing you might want to consider for the wiki. for some reason the arch install wiki acts as though there's an option to mount partitions without selecting a new filesystem. but when I tried to mount the shared /home partition in the arch install, it wouldn't allow me to do it without choosing a new filesystem and case-sensitive hfs+ wasn't one of the options. I just skipped it for the time being and then edited the fstab later.

Daenyth · 2008-07-02 15:41:59

macbox wrote:

oh! there's one other thing you might want to consider for the wiki. for some reason the arch install wiki acts as though there's an option to mount partitions without selecting a new filesystem. but when I tried to mount the shared /home partition in the arch install, it wouldn't allow me to do it without choosing a new filesystem and case-sensitive hfs+ wasn't one of the options. I just skipped it for the time being and then edited the fstab later.

You should file this on the bug tracker.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-01-01 21:26:24

sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

#2 2008-01-01 21:45:40

Re: sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

#3 2008-01-01 22:31:56

Re: sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

#4 2008-01-03 00:12:09

Re: sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

#5 2008-01-03 14:09:21

Re: sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

#6 2008-01-03 14:16:07

Re: sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

#7 2008-07-02 15:41:59

Re: sharing /home partition with arch and mac osx

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