portage dirs on vfat

[DarkAngel777]

I've found that when I put the portage and tmp dirs in the make.conf file on a fat32 partition I cannot get it to run, it has some kind of write error, I can read/write and do anything with it...I have it being mounted using:
/dev/hda7 /mnt/shared vfat user,rw,exec,umask=000,-odmask=0 0 0
it seems like there's some kind of problem with permissions vs fat32, but anyways I just wanted to say I've found this doesn't seem to be possible currently, although I'm very new to gentoo and linux in general, if someone knows of a way to make it work, that'd be wonderful, my reiserFS partition is too small to continue using, and I need my shared partition to be fat32.

[bonsaikitten]

Fat32 has no way of storing user/ group info and read/write/execute status, so effectively linux has to assume a "default" mode for all files.

Portage uses permissions in many places, I think a.t.m. it cannot be used on a fat32 partition.
(but *ahem* you could create a big file on fat32 and mount it through loopback as reiserfs )

[DarkAngel777]

Any idea where I can start looking for information on how to do that, it would be nice since the fat32 partition is 17gigs, and my reiserFS (root) partition is only 2.5 with 500mB free.

[bonsaikitten]

howto use a file as a loopback device:

1) create a file of desired size
dd if=/dev/zero of=/file/you/want bs=(sie in bytes)

2) mkreiserfs /file/you/want

3) mount -o loop /file/you/want /mountpoint/somewhere

For this to work you need loopback device support. Syntax is untested.
Fat32 can cause trouble if files exceed 2GBytes.

So please be careful, don't do anything that might affect important files ... and always make backups before fooling around!

[DarkAngel777]

Thanks a ton!! hopefully one day I'll be helping people too =D Kinda funny going from windows and always being able to quickly solve a problem, going back to the guy who asks all the questions again hahaha...