[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#497463: hal: kernel ntfs driver does not support locale= option, KDE fails to mount ntfs volumes

[Michael Biebl]

Package: hal
Version: 0.5.11-3
Severity: important

Raúl Sánchez Siles noticed, that mounting ntfs volumes from within KDE fails.
An analysis of the problem within Debian revealed the following issues:

There are currently 3 different fs drivers for ntfs
a) in-kernel ntfs
b) ntfs-3g (userspace)
c) ntfs-fuse (userspace, from ntfsprogs)

Only b) and c) support the locale= option.

There was a commit to hal [1] which allows to set the locale option, without 
taking into account, that in-kernel ntfs does not support this option.

gnome-mount uses ntfs-3g as fstype by default, thus circumvents this problem.
KDE uses ntfs as fstype, which by default in Debian, uses the in-kernel ntfs 
driver.

Possible solutions:
1.) Make KDE use ntfs-3g as default ntfs driver. Same behaviour as gnome-mount,
requires gnome-mount to be installed. If ntfs is used as fstype, don't pass 
locale option to hal.
2.) Modify 20-storage-methods.fdi to only allow the locale= option for ntfs-3g
and ntfs-fuse
3.) Make ntfs-3g install a symlink /sbin/mount.ntfs pointing to /usr/bin/ntfs-3g.
This why ntfs-3g will be used by default for ntfs volumes, even if fstype is not 
explicitely specified. If ntfs-3g is not installed, this will still fail.


Michael

[1]http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=hal.git;a=commit;h=a372bf79e16a5c6c00d0e262745dc935de364ca2

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (300, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26.3
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages hal depends on:
ii  adduser           3.110                  add and remove users and groups
ii  dbus              1.2.3-1                simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  hal-info          20080508+git20080601-1 Hardware Abstraction Layer - fdi f
ii  libc6             2.7-13                 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdbus-1-3       1.2.3-1                simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2  0.76-1                 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libexpat1         2.0.1-4                XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii  libgcc1           1:4.3.1-9              GCC support library
ii  libglib2.0-0      2.16.5-1               The GLib library of C routines
ii  libhal-storage1   0.5.11-3               Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libhal1           0.5.11-3               Hardware Abstraction Layer - share
ii  libsmbios1        0.13.13-1              Provide access to (SM)BIOS informa
ii  libstdc++6        4.3.1-9                The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii  libusb-0.1-4      2:0.1.12-12            userspace USB programming library
ii  libvolume-id0     0.125-6                libvolume_id shared library
ii  lsb-base          3.2-20                 Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip
ii  mount             2.13.1.1-1             Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  pciutils          1:3.0.0-4              Linux PCI Utilities
ii  pm-utils          1.1.2.4-1              utilities and scripts for power ma
ii  udev              0.125-6                /dev/ and hotplug management daemo
ii  usbutils          0.73-10                Linux USB utilities

Versions of packages hal recommends:
ii  eject                       2.1.5+deb1-1 ejects CDs and operates CD-Changer
pn  libsmbios-bin               <none>       (no description available)

Versions of packages hal suggests:
ii  gnome-device-manager          0.2-2      GNOME device manager based on HAL

-- no debconf information