FSter files and options

Now you have FSter installed on your system, and a valid configuration. Time to run your virtual filesystem!

First of all you need a mountpoint, a folder where contents generated by FSter will be disposed and made accessible by other applications. This must be an empty folder (you can create one ad-hoc) and you must have read and write permissions on it. Please consider you have to run FSter with the user you normally use on your computer, not as root or using the sudo command: FSter needs to hook your DBus session bus, which by security policy is accessible only by yourself; this restriction may be bypassed manipulating DBus configurations, but this is not the page where to explain such a complex procedure.

Just running
fster /your/preferred/mountpoint
it will automatically look for configuration in /usr/local/etc/fster/fster.xml (if the install path has not been changed). To customize this, use the -c flag as in
fster /your/preferred/mountpoint -c /path/of/your/file.xml
Many other options are available, as any other FUSE filesystem, to change low-level behaviours of the application: you probably don’t need them, try running
fster -h
to have a list of all.

At any time, running
mount
you obtain a list of all currently mounted filesystems on your computer: you must see something like
fster on /your/preferred/mountpoint type fuse.fster (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=your_user)

It may happen FSter will have some problem (please remember this is a young project ;–) ): if filesystem stop responding (e.g. an ls command on your mountpoint replies with “Transport endpoint is not connected”) execute
fusermount -uz /your/preferred/mountpoint
accept our apologies and launch again FSter.

Useful Options

-c file
reads the configuration from “file”. By default, and if no custom prefix has been define at compile time, the configuration file is read from /usr/local/etc/fster/fster.xml

-oallow_other
permits users other than the owner of the process to access the filesystem. Suggested if you have some privileges problem. You may have to edit the file /etc/fuse.conf to enable this option.

-s
runs in single-thread mode. Quite slow, but desiderable while debugging

-d
enable debug output, which may be really verbose

-h
output the complete list of commandline options, for skilled users only