2016-08-23 4:45 GMT-06:00 Rosanne DiMesio dimesio@earthlink.net:
On Mon, 22 Aug 2016 20:26:51 -0600 Alex Henrie alexhenrie24@gmail.com wrote:
In fact, it's easy to forget that you have to explicitly give execution permissions to a downloaded file before Linux will let you execute it. If the file is on a USB drive, unless the drive has a Linux filesystem, the binary must be moved off of the drive before it can receive execution permissions.
I have portable Firefox on a FAT32 formatted flash drive and Wine is able to run it.
Wine will run any EXE as long as you start it (or your desktop environment starts it) with `wine foobar.exe`. If you start it with `./foobar.exe` instead, the file must be executable and binfmt must be set up correctly.
Interestingly, it looks like Arch Linux and Ubuntu have both started to mount FAT32 filesystems with the "showexec" option. This makes EXE files on USB drives executable automatically. (It doesn't look very smart, it just turns on executability if the filename ends in ".exe".)
So I stand corrected; you're right that it's no longer necessary to change the mount options or copy the EXE to another filesystem. Still, no desktop environment is going to execute files off of a USB drive without asking.
-Alex