this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Unless there is a mapping between a UID of a user across many different machines (something like a domain controller), you're not going to be able to set proper permissions by user. You need to use a generic group, or provide global read access at a minimum.
I'm not 100% sure why you've chosen this route, but there are MUCH simpler ways of doing this that don't involve VMs and NTFS volumes.
At this point, you're butting up against 3 levels of nested permissions, including the VM. My suggestion would be to make sure all the files on the NTFS volume have global read access, then go into the VM and attempt to set NTFS permissions on the files (they are different). If that becomes too tedious, you could just try setting 777 on all shared files. It's unsafe, but may get you through until you find a more...workable solution for what you're doing here.
I think the overall solution is to just not need this Windows VM, so look at moving these sites off to Nginx or something ASAP.
Thanks for replying :)
I think there's some confusion though, none of the sites are hosted locally, PortableApps just lets me use a separate browser and email client for each website, effectively sandboxed from each other so that there's no chance of accidentally editing the wrong site or posting from the wrong account. Each PortableApps instance has its own set of logins and bookmarks etc. to manage one website and the associated emails.
I essentially just want to run a program in a Windows 10 VM that's stored on the Linux host but on an NTFS drive. As far as I can tell, the permissions on the NTFS drive are interfering with that, as the files are in the root group on Mint, whereas I'm in the tippon and vboxuser groups. I'm not sure how to change that without risking breaking something, but the way the NTFS drive is mounted through fstab seems to be the answer.
I think that changing fstab so that the drive is mounted under my user and group will fix it, but I don't know how that will affect anything else on the drive, or any Linux programs that access those files. I'm stuck with NTFS for now as I occasionally need to dual boot, and need these programs available while I'm in Windows too.
Ideally I'm going to move away from using PortableApps to manage the sites, but I haven't found a better way yet.
Firefox recently added a new profile manager to do just that. Thunderbird should also support having multiple separate profiles.
Yeah...this seems like OP is doing this in extra hard mode, and there are simpler ways to handle the problem.
Depending what exactly the OP needs, they may even be able to do it just using multi-account containers (sandboxed tab groups) in Firefox.
Unfortunately that won't work for me, I need them to be completely separate. I've got physical and mental issues that mean I get brain fog, and then get things muddled up. If the tab groups share things like bookmarks or saved logins, there's a chance that I'll open the wrong link, or log in to the wrong email.
KDE's Activities could help you. They are basically completely different desktop layouts and open programs for different tasks. You could set up one for each website with a different Firefox and Thunderbird profile and desktop wallpaper and other things.
That could work really well then, especially as I'm looking to change distros. Mint is great, but it's got a few issues that are getting in my way now.
Thank you :)
BTW, in general you can change your desktop environment without switching the distro. They just often come with a default. But installing another is usually one command away and then you can choose at the login screen.
I did look at changing the DE, but apparently KDE doesn't work well with Mint. I want to change distros anyway though, as some of the problems I'm having are from the outdated repos. I've only been on Mint properly for a few months, but have had to manually install a few programs already
The tab groups work by sandboxing a site to a specific one. Once you have it set up, every time you go to a site it'll open in the correct tab group. Each tab group has it's own seperate cookies.
If it's the same website with multiple different logins you're using though then yeah, this wouldn't help at all.
That could work then. I tend to have to use the same sites for the various sites, like Facebook for example, but it's rare that I need to use the same site for different accounts on the same site. Most of the sites use Gmail for now, but that does work well with multiple accounts.
I'll have a proper look when I get home later. Thank you :)
That's interesting. I knew that Firefox had options for different profiles, but last time I tried I couldn't get it working the way I wanted. I'll have another look, thanks :)