International Characters (utf8) in vfat on Linux

By thomas, 14 April, 2006
I have a partition formated vfat on my laptop so that I can access it from both Linux and Windows. I store my iTunes music there, so some of the directories have UTF8 characters. Bands like Moxy Früvous and Céline Dion show up as Moxy Fr?vous and C?line Dion by default. Adding the utf8 option to the mount solves the problem.
In /etc/fstab: /dev/sdb1 /media/usbdisk vfat utf8,user,noauto 0 0 I put in noauto because the filesystem will be mounted by root otherwise. I prefer to use the automounter (autofs) for this drive, so that it mounts as my group. /etc/auto.master: /misc /etc/auto.misc /etc/auto.misc: storage -fstype=vfat,user,uid=500,gid=500,utf8 :/dev/sdc1 Do a service autofs start and a chkconfig autofs on and you are ready to go. Make a link to /misc/storage on your desktop and then whenever you double-click on it, it will be mounted as uid 500, gid 500.