I installed Fedora 39 on an old iMac I had with a fusion drive (128GB SSD +1TB spinning disk.)
Fedora is installed on the SSD, and I want to use the spinning disk as a media drive. Problem is, it does not mount by default, so I figure I need to edit /etc/fstab to have it mount at startup.
I’m at work so I SSH into the iMac and get the UUID for the disk and then open fstab in vi, enter the new line with the uuid, directory I want the drive mounted in (/media), the filesystem (ext4) and the options. Try to write and quit, get an error the file is readonly. Try to set the file to noreadonly, write fails again. Try :wq! and get the error the file cannot be opened to write.
Exit vi, ls -la and see the file is read-only.
sudo chmod 644 fstab, put in password. ls -la shows file is still read only. lsattr fstab, immutable flag is not set.
Is this happening because I’m on SSH, or is there some other issue?
It was my understanding that btrfs is still new-ish and has some kinks to work out. Ext4 is pretty well understood at this point.
I use BTRFS and even have convenient Snapper snapshotting set up. It works great. Here is a whole step by step guide on how to set up your system with it: https://sysguides.com/install-fedora-with-snapshot-and-rollback-support
It’s been new-ish for ages now. The only recent developments I can remember about it are that it’s now the default for a bunch of distros (Fedora, OpenSuse has been using BTRFS by default for years), rather than ext4 which was the default before.
It has some peculiarities, but those are only really relevant if you plan to use the advanced features.
I appreciate the context and explanation.
No its very well established. In general its just like ext4 but a bit better I suppose. If you do a custom setup you will need to manually setup things like specific caching etc to really use it.
As distros still make you think that (Kubuntu still defaults to Xorg!) of course people think btrfs is not ready, while it never gave me a single problem