How to get your Thumb Drive working under gOS

Waiter there is a Thumb drive in my soup... ( Note this is for the first version of gOS )



I plugged my thumb drive in to my gOS computer because I wanted to take a pdf file with me the other day. When I plugged in my thumb drive I was happy to see it show up on the desk top. gOS gave it a icon just like the CD-RW so I was surprised when I could not write to it.

The first thing I did was right click on the thumb drive and check properties check the it said owner hans and permissions were others can read and owner can read and write. OK I thought I tried checking the others can write but I still could not.

Next I opened up the UXterm and tried to copy to /media/Lexar (Lexar is the brand of thumb drive I was using for this) 'permission denied' it told me maybe it was not mounted to write? Thinking it was something in the fstab file. I looked around on the web but nothing seemed to work. One more time I looked at the permissions from UXterm for the /dev/sda and /media/Lexar by typing :


cd /media

ls -l

that showed

drwxr-xr-x 3 root root ... Lexar


that was it ! I checked the file properties by right clicking on the icon again, they did not match . Then from the command line (UXterm) I typed



cd /media

sudo chown hans Lexar

#' can not change owner ship of Lexar'

Yes it told me I could not change the owner ship of my Lexar thumb drive but this what happened next I clicked on the Lexar thumb drive again, to check the properties still the same on the gui but now I could not open or read the device. "O NO I thought I just messed up my thumb drive." I pulled out my thumb drive it took a moment but then unmounted. I then plugged my Lexar back in to see if I could at least read from it; now it gave me a new icon for the device one that looked more like a floppy or removable media type icon. I still had the UXtem open and typed ls -l it gave me hans as owner. I was then able to copy to the device.

NOTES:

• In order to see the thumb drive listed in the /media directory (from the command line) when you type ls you must have the device mounted to do this you must click on the icon on the desktop and open it. Just because it shows up on the desktop does not mean it's mounted.
• Many articles will will talk about the command line for this article the command line and UXterm are used interchangeably.
• The article is geared towards new users of gOS Linux
• I used a Lexar thumb drive for this article it should be the same for any brand of USB thumb drive.