Description of problem: Fedora and newer RedHat Linux use HAL and the gnome-volume-manager which detects when you connect an USB Drive to your Linux Machine and then depending on the HAL entries mounts them, or not. Unfortunately you forgot to add a parameter when mounting vfat drives. This missing parameter is "iocharset=utf8". Without this missing mount parameter all german umlauts are sown as questionmarks. If you don't use HAL and the gnome-volume-manager you can just add in /etc/fstab to the vfat entry. If you use HAL, this doesn't work, because HAL writes an entry for the device you connect and might overwrite your iocharset=utf8 parameter. In this case you have create an own policy: create a file fatUmlauts.fdi in: /usr/share/hal/fdi/95userpolicy which contains: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- --> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <!-- mount vfat block devices with mountparameter iocharset=utf8 this should fix problems showing questionmarks instead of german umlauts --> <device> <match key="block.is_volume" bool="true"> <match key="volume.fstype" string="vfat"> <merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.iocharset=utf8" type="bool">true</merge> </match> </match> </device> </deviceinfo> It would be nice, when the next relase would contain this mount option by default. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. connect a vfat device containing german Umlauts (öäü) in filenames 2. ls a directory containing these filenames 3. the Umlauts are shows as questionmarks Actual Results: the device was mounted without the iocharset=utf8 parameter Expected Results: hal/fstab-sync should create an entry with iocharset=utf8 as mount parameter. Additional info:
DaveJ, per our discussion on IRC yesterday, any chance we can change the kernel such that the default iocharset for vfat is UTF-8? If no, please reassign back to hal and I'll deal with it from userspace.
I've been thinking about this. Basically if it sits in hal, or in kernel package, its going to be a patch that isn't going to go upstream, ever. However, from a maintainence point of view, the upstream vfat code does change quite regularly, making it a possibility that the patch would need redoing every time I rebase. hal should be less susceptable to such regular changes no?
Yeah, it should be painless to maintain in hal; I'll take the bug back :-)
This is fixed in hal-0.4.6 which will be in Rawhide and FC3 updates soon.
I may be wrong, but you should use utf8 option, not iocharset=utf8. Please refer to /usr/share/doc/kernel-doc-2.6.10/Documentation/filesystems/vfat.txt