bright static

Maybe this should have been obvious, but I just spent ten minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t cd into my sdcard on my G1. I checked the permissions and the system process had taken over the directory, with no permissions set at all:

$ ls -l /
...
d--------- system system 2009-05-09 11:30 sdcard
...

I couldn’t figure this out. Why would the system process have wiped all permissions from the directory? I had recently mounted it, while installing my new ultimate doom wad file (more on that later.) It turns out that since I still have the usb cable plugged in, even though I had unmounted the volume, the system process still wanted control of the sdcard. Makes sense, since ubuntu can still see the volume exists but is unmounted. Once I unplugged the cable everything went back to normal. Duh!