Won't launch when home folder is on HFS partition.

[mcoyle]

I run dual boot MacOS/Ubuntu12.04. My home folder is on its own partition shared between the two OSes. Unusual, I know. :-)

There doesn't seem to be a way to set the extended file system attributes on an HFS partition. As a result, I can't run Netflix unless I login as another user whose /home is on an ext partion.

Trying to add "user_xattr" to fstab for an HFS partition causes mount to fail.

Thanks for all your work.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

That's very odd, HFS+ _should_ support extended file system attributes. Can you use setfattr and getfattr on this filesystem?

[mcoyle (mcoyle1960)]

It's HFS, not HFS+.

Linux can't write to HFS+.

I was able to get Netflix to launch by linking to a .netflix-desktop folder on an ext partition.

I filed the bug in case there is a way in some future version to get around this unusual problem.

Thanks for the quick reply.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

I may be wrong, but it looks like traditional HFS doesn't support extended file system attributes. You could create a disk image ( http://www.azertech.net/content/creating-disk-images ) and then have /etc/fstab auto-mount the image to the .netflix-desktop folder.

[Erich E. Hoover (ehoover)]

FYI: I have some thoughts about how I might be able to convince GVFS to do automatically mount a special disk image, but I've been having trouble getting it to work. /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-archive is supposed to allow mounting disks like this, but I haven't been able to get it working properly :/

[D. Mark Simms (dmsimms)]

I have a similar problem with my home directory being on an NFS mount, and if I try to add "user_xattr" to the mount, then it won't mount anymore.

My solution was to modify the /usr/bin/netflix-desktop script to tell it that my home directory was somewhere else:

# Enable translation capabilities
. gettext.sh

# Added this line to allow netflix-desktop to run
export HOME=/opt/videos
# End of changes

export TEXTDOMAIN="netflix-desktop";
export TEXTDOMAINDIR="/usr/share/locale";
......

I post this here mostly as a help to anyone else who runs into the issue and comes across this bug report. Still, perhaps it would be nice if, when that "user_xattr" error message pops up, giving the user a way to change the directory to another location so that it might run?

[D. Mark Simms (dmsimms)]

Oops, just came across this: https://answers.launchpad.net/netflix-desktop/+question/220506

I like the solution there better than mine! I've created the .wine-desktop symlink in my home directory and pointed it to the .wine-browser directory that got created from my first fix, and it's all still working, thanks!

For others, here is what I ran:

ln -s /opt/videos/.wine-browser/ .wine-browser

After that, I removed the "export HOME" line that I had added to the netflix-desktop script.