For what reason the "official" Wine does not suppo

cledesol · Post by **cledesol** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 2:54 pm

Hello

A lot of windows application need access to an USB port.
For Wine a library (or a patch) exists to manage that but it is not include in the "official" release.
If we want to work with this USB port, we have to compile a personal version of Wine, but this is not really obvious for every body.

Why this feature is not include in the release ?

Do you plan an official release with USB ?

Regards

PS Apologies for poor my english but I am french

Sven · Post by **Sven** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 3:04 pm

Because the USB support patches didn't integrate properly with the current wine infrastructure. There was/is someone working on it though, and after the release of wine 1.2 (probably this week), patches to implement USB support will be accepted again. Patches to do this were not accepted before the release of wine 1.2, because USB support would never be ready before the actual release.

James Mckenzie · Post by **James Mckenzie** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 3:58 pm

cledesol <[email protected]> wrote:

Sent: Jul 14, 2010 12:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Wine] For what reason the "official" Wine does not support USB ?

Hello

A lot of windows application need access to an USB port.

Hmmm. Office 2007 and most games do not. That is the focus of this project at this time.

For Wine a library (or a patch) exists to manage that but it is not included in
the "official" release.

The patch was rejected for many reasons. It will be accepted when it is ready and properly written.

If we want to work with this USB port, we have to compile a personal version of Wine,
but this is not really obvious for every body.

There is/was a Sticky on this on the first page of the forum. It even included the bug report with the patch-in-progress.

Why this feature is not include in the release ?

Because it was not ready and complete.

Do you plan an official release with USB ?

When it is ready. A timeline cannot be placed on this. There are many reasons that code is rejected for inclusion to the project. Improper formatting, bad coding practices and incomplete implementation are a few. The latest version of the patch is what we consider a 'hack' and was far from completely implementing how USB devices work with Windows. The fact that Wine does not support USB hardware drivers is also being looked into. Again, there is no timeline when this has to be incorporated into Wine.

Regards

PS Apologies for poor my english but I am french

Your English is not bad, now my French is. Makes watching the Tour de France in French very interesting.

Jim Hall · Post by **Jim Hall** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 4:06 pm

On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 2:54 PM, cledesol <[email protected]> wrote:

Hello

A lot of windows application need access to an USB port.
For Wine a library (or a patch) exists to manage that but it is not include
in the "official" release.
If we want to work with this USB port, we have to compile a personal
version of Wine, but this is not really obvious for every body.

Why this feature is not include in the release ?

Do you plan an official release with USB ?

Regards

PS Apologies for poor my english but I am french

No need to apologize for your English. You actually do better than some

people I've talked to over the years. And don't worry about being French,
we're an inclusive group. <joke>

Jim
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Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 10:28 pm

On 7/14/2010 1:57 PM, James Mckenzie wrote:

cledesol<[email protected]> wrote:
Sent: Jul 14, 2010 12:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Wine] For what reason the "official" Wine does not support USB ?

Hello

A lot of windows application need access to an USB port.
Hmmm. Office 2007 and most games do not. That is the focus of this project at this time.

For Wine a library (or a patch) exists to manage that but it is not included in
the "official" release.
The patch was rejected for many reasons. It will be accepted when it is ready and properly written.

If we want to work with this USB port, we have to compile a personal version of Wine,
but this is not really obvious for every body.
There is/was a Sticky on this on the first page of the forum. It even included the bug report with the patch-in-progress.

Why this feature is not include in the release ?
Because it was not ready and complete.

Do you plan an official release with USB ?

When it is ready. A timeline cannot be placed on this. There are many reasons that code is rejected for inclusion to the project. Improper formatting, bad coding practices and incomplete implementation are a few. The latest version of the patch is what we consider a 'hack' and was far from completely implementing how USB devices work with Windows. The fact that Wine does not support USB hardware drivers is also being looked into. Again, there is no timeline when this has to be incorporated into Wine.

Regards

PS Apologies for poor my english but I am french

Your English is not bad, now my French is. Makes watching the Tour de France in French very interesting.

Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB
port with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from
using the PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file
corruption on my Passport drive and required a significant amount of
effort for me to recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

Sure would have been nice if a README or Release Notes had been included
with my distro's package (openSuSE11.2) giving me a heads up on this USB
issue, especially since it is apparently a known issue to the developers!

I downgraded Wine back to version 1.1.28-2.3-i586 which does work, but I
am back to living with some font problems in Thunderbird that I was
hoping the upgrade would fix.. Guess I will live with that for awhile
longer...

Marc..

Post by **dimesio** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 10:45 pm

Marc Chamberlin wrote: Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB
port with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from
using the PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file
corruption on my Passport drive and required a significant amount of
effort for me to recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

Sure would have been nice if a README or Release Notes had been included
with my distro's package (openSuSE11.2) giving me a heads up on this USB
issue, especially since it is apparently a known issue to the developers!

I downgraded Wine back to version 1.1.28-2.3-i586 which does work, but I
am back to living with some font problems in Thunderbird that I was
hoping the upgrade would fix.. Guess I will live with that for awhile
longer...

Marc..

Please run a regression test and file a bug. http://wiki.winehq.org/RegressionTesting

I don't know where you got the idea that this was a "known issue." AFAIK, you're the first person to report it.

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 11:22 pm

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 05:28, Marc Chamberlin <[email protected]> wrote:

Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB port
with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from using the
PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. Â It also caused file corruption on
my Passport drive and required a significant amount of effort for me to
recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

That's a completely different issue.... Everyone thougfht this is
about using USB drivers under Wine...

Wine doen't currently allow Windows USB drivers...

It should work with ?USB disk though... (It might be sensitive to the
filesystem though, since the Linux filesystem drivers doesn't seem to
support the same features on all filesystems) That shouldn't change
between versions, especially not between RCs....

Gert

cledesol · Post by **cledesol** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 2:31 am

Sven wrote:Because the USB support patches didn't integrate properly with the current wine infrastructure. There was/is someone working on it though, and after the release of wine 1.2 (probably this week), patches to implement USB support will be accepted again. Patches to do this were not accepted before the release of wine 1.2, because USB support would never be ready before the actual release.

Thanks to sven and James for the explanations

My need about Wine and USB is for a GPS update software (Navigon Fresh).
They do not plan to port it to Linux.
The software run with Wine but cannot acces to the GPS connected to an USB port.

I will try to compile myself and test what's hapen ....

Regards

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 6:56 am

On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 06:21 +0200, Gert van den Berg wrote:

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 05:28, Marc Chamberlin <[email protected]> wrote:
Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB port
with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from using the
PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file corruption on
my Passport drive and required a significant amount of effort for me to
recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

That's a completely different issue.... Everyone thougfht this is
about using USB drivers under Wine...

How is your Passport drive formatted - ext2/3 or vfat?

The default for USB drives is vfat, i.e. FAT-32.

Martin

James Mckenzie · Post by **James Mckenzie** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 9:15 am

Martin Gregorie <[email protected]> wrote:

Sent: Jul 15, 2010 4:56 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Wine] For what reason the "official" Wine does not support USB ?

On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 06:21 +0200, Gert van den Berg wrote:
On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 05:28, Marc Chamberlin <[email protected]> wrote:
Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB port
with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from using the
PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file corruption on
my Passport drive and required a significant amount of effort for me to
recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

That's a completely different issue.... Everyone thougfht this is
about using USB drivers under Wine...

How is your Passport drive formatted - ext2/3 or vfat?

The default for USB drives is vfat, i.e. FAT-32.

The WD Passport drive IS formated as VFAT32 out of the box and if you want to use their security software, it has to remain so.

The problem is that their security software IS NOT supported under Linux. Don't know if Wine will correct this. I still have to fix my Thinkpad's installation of Fedora. I cannot get X to start on it (and the installation screens are really funky as well.)

Contact me OFF LIST if you want to assist with an FC12 installation.

James McKenzie

James Mckenzie · Post by **James Mckenzie** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 9:27 am

cledesol <[email protected]> wrote:

My need about Wine and USB is for a GPS update software (Navigon Fresh).
They do not plan to port it to Linux.
The software run with Wine but cannot acces to the GPS connected to an USB port.

Folks have been able to connect Garmin GPS devices to Linux and they appear as a removable storage device. Have you examined your system to see if a new device appears when the GPS device is plugged in?

James McKenzie

James Mckenzie · Post by **James Mckenzie** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 9:35 am

Marc Chamberlin <[email protected]> wrote:

Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB
port with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from
using the PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file
corruption on my Passport drive and required a significant amount of
effort for me to recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

This has got to be a Linux issue. I use a Passport drive on my Mac without issue.

Can you look at what Linux does with the drive. Also, and as far as I know, there is no security software for Linux. If you enabled the security features of the drive in Windows, the drive should be invisible to Linux.

Sure would have been nice if a README or Release Notes had been included
with my distro's package (openSuSE11.2) giving me a heads up on this USB
issue, especially since it is apparently a known issue to the developers!

Known issue to which developers? Maybe OpenSUSE, but certainly not Wine's as you are the first person to describe this problem. Again, a Linux issue is not a Wine issue.

I downgraded Wine back to version 1.1.28-2.3-i586 which does work, but I
am back to living with some font problems in Thunderbird that I was
hoping the upgrade would fix.. Guess I will live with that for awhile
longer...

That is a long way back (.50 versus .28). Do you know when this actually 'broke'?

A regression test is in order. However, I normally would recommend a backup, but these external devices are usually purposed for this.

James McKenzie

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 10:20 am

On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 07:34 -0700, James Mckenzie wrote:

This has got to be a Linux issue. I use a Passport drive on my Mac
without issue.

I use a vanilla Formac USB drive (2.5", 120GB) and an old WD (3.5",
120GB) for backups. I reformatted both as single ext3 partitions to get
round the annoying FAT-32 4GB limit on individual file sizes. The WD is
used for compressed daily overnight backups which started to fail as
soon as a compressed backup hit 4GB, which is when *it* got reformatted.
I didn't mess round with the Formac. It got reformatted as soon as I
plugged it in for the first time. The Formac is used for weekly offline
backup via rsync and is fast (8-12 mins per backed up computer).

Both 'just work' and, because I'm not using vfat, the file permissions
don't get messed up and the file ownership isn't lost.

Martin

James Mckenzie · Post by **James Mckenzie** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 10:32 am

Martin Gregorie <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 07:34 -0700, James Mckenzie wrote:
This has got to be a Linux issue. I use a Passport drive on my Mac
without issue.

Both 'just work' and, because I'm not using vfat, the file permissions
don't get messed up and the file ownership isn't lost.

This is how it should be. Security software should also be 'transparent', but it isn't. Hopefully, WD will release a Linux version (if they have not already done so) of the software that locks their Passport drives. This is a well-known security problem with removable devices (USB flash/hard drives.) The do have software for the Mac that works with both Intel and PowerPC systems. Maybe a few Linux users 'prodding' them to produce a Linux version might be enough to get them to do so.

However, the problem is not that Linux/UNIX/Wine does not support hard drives and flash drives, it is the 'other' USB devices, like pluggable phones (I had a Samsung one and I could NEVER acces the internal storage on it.) Things like this are keeping folks from fully adopting Linux/Wine as an alternative to Windows (not a replacement, we have a long way to go before that can be considered) and to see migrations from Windows to Linux.

We do have folks working, independent of each other, to create USB solution(s). A concentrated effort could bring USB devices as another supported feature to Wine without the driver mess that Windows creates.

Just a thought.

James McKenzie

Martin

Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 11:30 am

On 7/14/2010 8:45 PM, dimesio wrote:

Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB
port with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from
using the PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file
corruption on my Passport drive and required a significant amount of
effort for me to recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

Sure would have been nice if a README or Release Notes had been included
with my distro's package (openSuSE11.2) giving me a heads up on this USB
issue, especially since it is apparently a known issue to the developers!

I downgraded Wine back to version 1.1.28-2.3-i586 which does work, but I
am back to living with some font problems in Thunderbird that I was
hoping the upgrade would fix.. Guess I will live with that for awhile
longer...

Marc..
Please run a regression test and file a bug. http://wiki.winehq.org/RegressionTesting

I don't know where you got the idea that this was a "known issue." AFAIK, you're the first person to report it.

Dimeso - I don't have a lot of spare time to learn about and run the regression tests for wine, but if I get an extra moment I will look into it for you... As far as where I got the idea that this was a "known issue", I inferred it from the previous replies in this thread by Sven and Jame Mckenzie. If you read their responses it sure sounds like this issue about USB support was known to them...

Marc..

Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 11:34 am

On 7/15/2010 4:56 AM, Martin Gregorie wrote:

On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 06:21 +0200, Gert van den Berg wrote:
On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 05:28, Marc Chamberlin<[email protected]> wrote:
Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB port
with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from using the
PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file corruption on
my Passport drive and required a significant amount of effort for me to
recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

That's a completely different issue.... Everyone thougfht this is
about using USB drivers under Wine...

How is your Passport drive formatted - ext2/3 or vfat?

The default for USB drives is vfat, i.e. FAT-32.

Martin

Martin - My Passport drive is formatted for FAT-32
Marc..

Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 11:38 am

On 7/15/2010 7:14 AM, James Mckenzie wrote:

Martin Gregorie<[email protected]> wrote:
Sent: Jul 15, 2010 4:56 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Wine] For what reason the "official" Wine does not support USB ?

On Thu, 2010-07-15 at 06:21 +0200, Gert van den Berg wrote:
On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 05:28, Marc Chamberlin<[email protected]> wrote: That's a completely different issue.... Everyone thougfht this is
about using USB drivers under Wine...

How is your Passport drive formatted - ext2/3 or vfat?

The default for USB drives is vfat, i.e. FAT-32.

The WD Passport drive IS formated as VFAT32 out of the box and if you want to use their security software, it has to remain so.

The problem is that their security software IS NOT supported under Linux. Don't know if Wine will correct this. I still have to fix my Thinkpad's installation of Fedora. I cannot get X to start on it (and the installation screens are really funky as well.)

Contact me OFF LIST if you want to assist with an FC12 installation.

James McKenzie

James - No I am not using any of the security software that came with
the Passport. In fact I removed all of it. I strictly use the drive to
run the various PortableApps (www.portableapps.com) so as to have a set
of common tools/data as I switch between Windows and Linux systems.

Marc...

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 11:48 am

James - No I am not using any of the security software that came with the
Passport. In fact I removed all of it. I strictly use the drive to run the
various PortableApps (www.portableapps.com) so as to have a set of common
tools/data as I switch between Windows and Linux systems.

Then the drive should be directly mountable under linux.

John

Post by **dimesio** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:02 pm

As far as where I got the idea that this was a "known issue", I inferred it from the previous replies in this thread by Sven and Jame Mckenzie. If you read their responses it sure sounds like this issue about USB support was known to them...

You misunderstood the original question in this thread. That was about the unofficial patch for support of USB devices (http://wiki.winehq.org/USB). That patch has never been part of official Wine, and is completely unrelated to your problem. If an older version of Wine works, and the latest doesn't, that's a regression, and you should file a bug.

Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:02 pm

On 7/15/2010 7:34 AM, James Mckenzie wrote:

Marc Chamberlin<[email protected]> wrote:
Version 1.1.50_1.2rc7-1.1-i586 of Wine broke my ability to use the USB
port with a Western Digital Passport disk drive. That prevents me from
using the PortableApps tools under Wine on Linux. It also caused file
corruption on my Passport drive and required a significant amount of
effort for me to recover. So DO NOT use this version with USB disk drives!!

This has got to be a Linux issue. I use a Passport drive on my Mac without issue.

Can you look at what Linux does with the drive. Also, and as far as I know, there is no security software for Linux. If you enabled the security features of the drive in Windows, the drive should be invisible to Linux.

James - Thanks for your replies... I have not had any USB issues
either, with using my Passport under Linux/Wine until I upgraded to rc7.
And then I started experience all sorts of problems... Typically, the
drive would mount OK as far as Linux was concerned, then I would use
wine to launch to PortableApps control application. That much would
"appear" to work fine, but then I would launch the PortableApps version
of Thunderbird, Firefox or some other app and soon discover that the
Passport drive was no longer writable and act as if it had been mounted
somehow as a read-only device. (Not true, it was originally mounted as
read/write) That in turn, of course, lead to these apps crashing and
locking up the drive. I would have to kill the processes at that point,
and it was at this point I discovered that the Passport file system had
become corrupted. Dropping back to an earlier version of wine has
resolved this and my Passport is again working fine. Therefore I must
disagree with you as the evidence seems to strongly indicate this is a
wine issue and not a Linux one...

Sure would have been nice if a README or Release Notes had been included
with my distro's package (openSuSE11.2) giving me a heads up on this USB
issue, especially since it is apparently a known issue to the developers!

Known issue to which developers? Maybe OpenSUSE, but certainly not Wine's as you are the first person to describe this problem. Again, a Linux issue is not a Wine issue.

As I replied earlier, I inferred this was a known issue from yours, and
Sven's responses earlier in this thread...

I downgraded Wine back to version 1.1.28-2.3-i586 which does work, but I
am back to living with some font problems in Thunderbird that I was
hoping the upgrade would fix.. Guess I will live with that for awhile
longer...
That is a long way back (.50 versus .28). Do you know when this actually 'broke'?

I use the versions of wine that have been vetted by the openSuSE distro
and placed in their repositories. These are the only two versions of
wine available at the moment, for openSuSE11.2. So no, I do not know
when this actually 'broke', just that when I picked up the latest
version - rc7 from their "factory" repository, my Passport drive failed
on me as described....

(My reasons for trying the upgrade was to see if it might resolve some
font issues I am having with using the PortableApps version of
Thunderbird. For example it will not properly display the '<' character
(less than). The native version of Thunderbird, under Linux, does
display this and other characters just fine, hence my suspicion that
this is also a wine issue....)

A regression test is in order. However, I normally would recommend a backup, but these external devices are usually purposed for this.

James McKenzie

Marc...

Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:10 pm

On 7/15/2010 9:48 AM, John Drescher wrote:

James - No I am not using any of the security software that came with the
Passport. In fact I removed all of it. I strictly use the drive to run the
various PortableApps (www.portableapps.com) so as to have a set of common
tools/data as I switch between Windows and Linux systems.

Then the drive should be directly mountable under linux.

John

John - Yes, the drive mounts fine initially. I use Fat32 format since I
want to use the drive both under Windoz and Linux. It was not until I
started using wine to run my PortableApps that I start having problems
with it. If I simply mount the drive under Linux, I can use other Linux
utilities with it just fine. But once I tried to use Wine - rc7 to run
the apps on it, then the usage of the drive broke and it started to act
as if it was a read-only device, with file corruption problems occurring..

Marc..

Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:14 pm

On 7/15/2010 10:02 AM, dimesio wrote:

As far as where I got the idea that this was a "known issue", I inferred it from the previous replies in this thread by Sven and Jame Mckenzie. If you read their responses it sure sounds like this issue about USB support was known to them...

You misunderstood the original question in this thread. That was about the unofficial patch for support of USB devices (http://wiki.winehq.org/USB). That patch has never been part of official Wine, and is completely unrelated to your problem. If an older version of Wine works, and the latest doesn't, that's a regression, and you should file a bug.

Ok, thanks for clearing that up for me! I will file a bug report later
today... Marc..

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 12:15 pm

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 19:02, Marc Chamberlin <[email protected]> wrote:

James - Â Thanks for your replies... Â I have not had any USB issues either,
with using my Passport under Linux/Wine until I upgraded to rc7. And then I
started experience all sorts of problems... Typically, the drive would mount
OK as far as Linux was concerned, then I would use wine to launch to
PortableApps control application. That much would "appear" to work fine, but
then I would launch the PortableApps version of Thunderbird, Firefox or some
other app and soon discover that the Passport drive was no longer writable
and act as if it had been mounted somehow as a read-only device. (Not true,
it was originally mounted as read/write) That in turn, of course, lead to
these apps crashing and locking up the drive. I would have to kill the
processes at that point, and it was at this point I discovered that the
Passport file system had become corrupted. Dropping back to an earlier
version of wine has resolved this and my Passport is again working fine.
Therefore I must disagree with you as the evidence seems to strongly
indicate this is a wine issue and not a Linux one...

Is the drive still actually writable under Linux directly?

I have a 80GB (internal IDE) drive (with an ext3 partition) that
sometimes stop being writeable (from native applications) until I
reboot... (It seem to not happen since I upgraded to a new version of
Ubuntu)

The corruption also should not be possible to be done by Wine..
(nothing run as a non-root user should be able to corrupt a
filesystem...)

It might be that the way files are handled under Win changed between
the two version that might trigger a bug elsewhere? Finding which
change caused this is where a regression test would be handy... (For
something that takes long to test like this issue apparently it is
quite frustrating...)

Gert

Marc Chamberlin · Post by **Marc Chamberlin** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 1:10 pm

On 7/15/2010 10:14 AM, Gert van den Berg wrote:

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 19:02, Marc Chamberlin<[email protected]> wrote:
James - Â Thanks for your replies... Â I have not had any USB issues either,
with using my Passport under Linux/Wine until I upgraded to rc7. And then I
started experience all sorts of problems... Typically, the drive would mount
OK as far as Linux was concerned, then I would use wine to launch to
PortableApps control application. That much would "appear" to work fine, but
then I would launch the PortableApps version of Thunderbird, Firefox or some
other app and soon discover that the Passport drive was no longer writable
and act as if it had been mounted somehow as a read-only device. (Not true,
it was originally mounted as read/write) That in turn, of course, lead to
these apps crashing and locking up the drive. I would have to kill the
processes at that point, and it was at this point I discovered that the
Passport file system had become corrupted. Dropping back to an earlier
version of wine has resolved this and my Passport is again working fine.
Therefore I must disagree with you as the evidence seems to strongly
indicate this is a wine issue and not a Linux one...
Is the drive still actually writable under Linux directly?

I have a 80GB (internal IDE) drive (with an ext3 partition) that
sometimes stop being writeable (from native applications) until I
reboot... (It seem to not happen since I upgraded to a new version of
Ubuntu)

The corruption also should not be possible to be done by Wine..
(nothing run as a non-root user should be able to corrupt a
filesystem...)

It might be that the way files are handled under Win changed between
the two version that might trigger a bug elsewhere? Finding which
change caused this is where a regression test would be handy... (For
something that takes long to test like this issue apparently it is
quite frustrating...)

Gert

Thanks Gert for your thoughts! No, once the drive changed states to
being read-only, after running my wine apps, the only recourse I have to
getting it going again is to reboot. I cannot dismount the drive as
Linux continues to believe some process is using it, even though I have
killed all the PortableApps processes and stopped the wine server
itself. It is interesting to note that whenever I get into trouble with
using the Passport drive, even the Linux system itself cannot dismount
the drive during its shutdown process. Which is really surprising since
dismounting all drives is one of the last things that happens, after all
other system and user processes have been terminated!

Marc..

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Thu Jul 15, 2010 1:17 pm

Thanks Gert for your thoughts! No, once the drive changed states to being
read-only, after running my wine apps, the only recourse I have to getting
it going again is to reboot. I cannot dismount the drive as Linux continues
to believe some process is using it, even though I have killed all the
PortableApps processes and stopped the wine server itself. It is interesting
to note that whenever I get into trouble with using the Passport drive,
even the Linux system itself cannot dismount the drive during its shutdown
process. Which is really surprising since dismounting all drives is one of
the last things that happens, after all other system and user processes have
been terminated!

Look at your dmesg output. To me this sounds like a HW failure or a kernel bug.\

John