On Sat, 27 Mar 1999, George Bonser wrote: > Because only root can write to an MSDOS partition and you do not want to > be root doing normal things. In other words, you should only be root when > you have to do some administrative task that requires root and then you go > back to being a user again. Users can not write to MSDOS.
This is not quite true. By default, you're right, but mount will take a uid/gid option and set all the mounted files to that owner/group. How else do regular users write to a DOS floppy? Also, as long as you put a read-only section, say /usr, on the vfat partition, you'll be okay. Off the top of my head, here are the reasons I wouldn't do it: 1. Security. DOS doesn't have the file permisions for a multiuser system, and I wouldn't trust it. 2. If it breaks, how do you fix it? There's no fsck for vfat. 3. Lots of programs are going to assume a unix-type file system. Debian itself, for instance, will probably break into little tiny pieces on a file system without symlinks.
