Syllable now has support for reading and writing NTFS partitions and drives. The Wiki page states that the driver came from the Linux world, the Linux 2.4.23 NTFS driver. The driver was ported in 8 hours, and testing is much appreciated.
Linux’s NTFS driver supports writing to files since 2.6.15 (which was released on 3 January), it’s only missing creation/deletion of files and mmap-based writes
Now, that’s the kernel driver. The Linux NTFS project has a userspace library which may have already write support. They also have a FUSE filesystem NTFS program that allwos creating files and that probably uses libntfs
This is huge! Now i don’t have to download stuff and burn it to cd’s to transport files from my XP install to my syllable partion! I cant wait to try this, this is pretty sweet.
“This is huge! Now i don’t have to download stuff and burn it to cd’s to transport files from my XP install to my syllable partion! I cant wait to try this, this is pretty sweet.”
Too bad (most of) everyone else in the linux [distro] game doesn’t think so, because writing to NTFS doesn’t “just work”.
A few days ago Xandros got bashed for not beeing a true (free) linux distro, and yet they realised the importance of this, as other small things. Cheers to them.
I hope other distros follow these steps, soon(tm)…
I completely understand why most Linux distributions don’t include NTFS write support yet. Right now, they have the option of the native kernel NTFS write support which can be generously described as “preliminary,” or the ntfsmount project which is built on top of FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace), a feature that was merged into the mainline kernel at 2.6.14. I’ll acknowledge the existence of captive-ntfs, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemies.
There are reasonably simple HOWTOs for several distributions on setting up ntfsmount using FUSE. Here’s one for FC5:
If it’s that simple, then why don’t they install it by default? We’re dealing with filesystems here, and more importantly, we’re dealing with Windows filesystems, and even more importantly, we’re dealing with them using an experimental reverse-engineered driver. If I were a release manager for a Linux distribution, I wouldn’t include a feature by default that might corrupt users’ Windows installations after the first time they boot Linux (automount the NTFS filesystem). It seems that most of the actual release managers agree.
Xandros is including NTFS write support using commercial software from Paragon. They charge $20 for a kernel module and a mount/umount extension. The full version which includes a mkfs extension, a fsck extension, and logical volume and RAID support runs $150. They offer a free demo in the form of a LiveCD. No, you can’t just copy the kernel module and mount binaries from the LiveCD, it’s all locked down, I checked
Maybe the wiki page was updated after this article was posted, but it pretty clearly states under the “Missing features” headline that
“File write doesn’t work”
not hard to miss.
In regards to Xandros having a proprietary RW NTFS module for their kernel, wow. I *know* the free version is OS and all that, but I’m a little let down that they’re so far behind their commercial counterparts.
Well, this driver can’t possibly be a full ntfs write driver as the linux driver doesn’t fully support that.
It must be limited writing or very unsafe writing, AFAIK.
But then, the port is still completely new.
Anyway, this is one more notch for Syllable
Linux’s NTFS driver supports writing to files since 2.6.15 (which was released on 3 January), it’s only missing creation/deletion of files and mmap-based writes
Now, that’s the kernel driver. The Linux NTFS project has a userspace library which may have already write support. They also have a FUSE filesystem NTFS program that allwos creating files and that probably uses libntfs
This is huge! Now i don’t have to download stuff and burn it to cd’s to transport files from my XP install to my syllable partion! I cant wait to try this, this is pretty sweet.
“This is huge! Now i don’t have to download stuff and burn it to cd’s to transport files from my XP install to my syllable partion! I cant wait to try this, this is pretty sweet.”
Too bad (most of) everyone else in the linux [distro] game doesn’t think so, because writing to NTFS doesn’t “just work”.
A few days ago Xandros got bashed for not beeing a true (free) linux distro, and yet they realised the importance of this, as other small things. Cheers to them.
I hope other distros follow these steps, soon(tm)…
I completely understand why most Linux distributions don’t include NTFS write support yet. Right now, they have the option of the native kernel NTFS write support which can be generously described as “preliminary,” or the ntfsmount project which is built on top of FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace), a feature that was merged into the mainline kernel at 2.6.14. I’ll acknowledge the existence of captive-ntfs, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemies.
There are reasonably simple HOWTOs for several distributions on setting up ntfsmount using FUSE. Here’s one for FC5:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=112316
If it’s that simple, then why don’t they install it by default? We’re dealing with filesystems here, and more importantly, we’re dealing with Windows filesystems, and even more importantly, we’re dealing with them using an experimental reverse-engineered driver. If I were a release manager for a Linux distribution, I wouldn’t include a feature by default that might corrupt users’ Windows installations after the first time they boot Linux (automount the NTFS filesystem). It seems that most of the actual release managers agree.
Xandros is including NTFS write support using commercial software from Paragon. They charge $20 for a kernel module and a mount/umount extension. The full version which includes a mkfs extension, a fsck extension, and logical volume and RAID support runs $150. They offer a free demo in the form of a LiveCD. No, you can’t just copy the kernel module and mount binaries from the LiveCD, it’s all locked down, I checked
This is pure kernel-mode driver. Linux doesn’t support NTFS-write properly in kernel mode, so I didn’t bother with file write code.
Great news. Interoperability is allways a plus an Syllable is realy coming along nice.
I wonder if one could hack Opentracker/Deskbar to run on top of it. It could be a defenitive boost to its usuability, imho.
Contratulations, and keep up the good work.
Maybe the wiki page was updated after this article was posted, but it pretty clearly states under the “Missing features” headline that
“File write doesn’t work”
not hard to miss.
In regards to Xandros having a proprietary RW NTFS module for their kernel, wow. I *know* the free version is OS and all that, but I’m a little let down that they’re so far behind their commercial counterparts.