how could I share workspace between ubuntu and windows xp?

Question

I am using ubuntu 8.04 and windows xp. I mount the fat32 disk which contains eclipse workspace to ubuntu. but I find I could not use the workspace, maybe I have no right to use it.

the fat32 disk I mounted has the 755 right,I try to use chmod to change it to 777 but failed. I try to mount it to 777 mode, but I find there is nothing about mode in vfat option.

How should I do next ? how could I share the workspace? Help me. thanks.

Answer 1

How did you mount the partition in your /etc/fstab? did you use the option rw to mount it as read-write?

Can you tell me the output of:

cat /etc/mtab

Answer 2

I believe that the fat32 doesn't support the same kind of permissions as the linux ones you are familiar with. Once you have sorted out the rw option in /etc/mtab then I think you will have a better time.

However, the step after that is to have two different installations of Eclipse working on the same workspace.

I haven't had a lot of success with this (though haven't tried you're exact scenario), but I would be careful to:

• keep the Eclipse versions in synch
• only use relative paths, and relative to the workspace. This is probably good practice any way, but is worth repeating.

If all goes well, then you should be sharing everything, including preferences across both installations.

There are two refinements I can think of, which may be useful to reason about, if not actually do:

• you could probably share most of the installation of eclipse (the plugins and features directory, if not the config.ini and eclipse.ini files). If you can't put both executables in the same directory, consider the -install and -configuration runtime options.
• if you can't do any of these things, then you may need to work on two parallel workspaces. You can keep them in synch with tools such as rsync or even a distributed source control like mecurial.

Answer 3

Instead of trying to share the raw workspace data between two different systems, I suggest to do it like in typical big software development projects. Use a version control system to store your code and commit/update to and from that version control system instead of sharing files.

This may not be the answer you were originally interested in, but rest assured, you will notice many advantages of that version control system after some time, including:

• Easily get back to the code version before todays "genius" changes which didn't really work at the end
• There is a backup of your project in case your workstation dies
• You may even access your project from a completely different machine/location.

If your project is going to be open source, you can even use public services like Sourceforge.net.

Answer 4

I agree with bananeweizen.myopenid, and have the following tip to add:

When creating your build path entries, reference all outside resources (eg, jarfiles) using classpath variables. This will allow you to move the .classpath file between environments (or even check it into source control, if you're the sole developer) without running into problems with pathnames.

To reference a JARFile via variable, go into the "Libraries" tab of the Build Path, remove any existing reference to the library, and click "Add Variable...". You will need to define common variables, such as M2_REPO or LOCAL_LIBS, and you will need to make sure that those definitions are available in all your environments.

Answer 5

Perhaps the problem you're having is with capitalization. Be sure to create the workspace in Ubuntu first. This should rule out any filename capitalization issues.