permissions and vfat

[Caleb Chaplin <caleb videotron ca>]

Hi everyone,

Please excuse me if this has been asked plenty times before, but I'm having 
trouble establishing read/write/exec permissions of a directory on a vfat 
partition and nothing I try seems to work.  Namely, variations on chown and 
chmod never seem to work on any folders there and root remains the only user 
who can actually copy files there.  I'm trying to give a roomate her own 
directory on a vfat storage partition with total control over it's contents, 
be it copying/modifying files there or adding new directories.  Some google 
searching yielded a hint that vfat was never designed with group permissions 
in mind and therefore doesn't respond to them, but I can't help but feel I'm 
missing something totally obvious here.

If someone could spell out the obvious for me I'd be grateful, thanks.

Caleb