Mounting NTFS file-systems as writeable on Fiesty Fawn

Recently, I got my self an external hard disk for easy carrying around of large data...
The USB disk was automatically detected and mounted !! ...but as read-only :(....
Now, I don't want to get rid of NTFS on the disk, as this would be flipped back and forth between Windows and Linux OSes... (could have chosen FAT 32..had it not been for the 2GB/file limit)....
I found this doc about mounting the NTFS file-systems in read/write mode... but before doing what the document says...you need 2 install the ntfs-config package.

sudo apt-get install ntfs-config

After successfully installing the ntfs-config package, do what the doc says and voila you can mount all your NTFS partitions automatically and enable them writable.

P.S. This sorta worked automatically with my hard drives ..but my external drive was having some trouble....Some how, though automatically detected and mounted.....it was write-able only by the super user (root)...the "Create Folder" option had been greyed out :(...Being a command line buff.. I sudo ed (shud I say su-did :P) "mkdir" and it worked, if the user is root...I'm not sure what exactly is th e solution to this problem, but after a couple of mounts and unmounts...I'm able to create files as a "sudo" capable user! My external drive works perfectly now!!!

Note: Running commands using sudo will give the user the ultimate power; you better know what you are doing and do it at your own risk :)

Viewing VCD's with Ubuntu

Couple of days bak..I borrowed some VCDs to watch over the weekend..but somehow Ubuntu always said something like :




I kept wondering, while other CDs burnt as ISO images could be mounted simply, but not the CDs brought over frm the VCD store..
then I read a post from Ubuntu forum that cdfs driver must be installed.
I got cdfs-src downloaded via., "Synaptic Package Manager" and compiled (which failed incidentally, and by the way not some thing new with Ubuntu :( ..But, I got the cdfs source from this website, which compiled perfectly fine....
Running this command:
sudo insmod cdfs.ko
should load the driver; "sudo lsmod | grep cdfs" should tell u if the driver has been loaded...Now you shud be able to use ur VCDs to watch all the movies u want!
A catch here is the entry in the entry in /etc/fstab file:
Default entry was :
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom udf,iso9660 user,noauto 0 0

But, to load the VCDs automatically, I had to change it to:

/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,cdfs user,noauto 0 0

Now, disks burnt as ISOs do not automatically load :(; I'm looking for a way to automtically detect the FS and use the appropriate mount command..You r welcome to help me out!

Watch out for some exiciting Ubuntu tips and tricks here....