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?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    2·
    5 months ago

    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.