Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Knoppix Variant Offers Full NTFS Write Support

Posted by timothy on from the like-a-hot-swiss-army-knife-through-butter dept.

mache writes "Full NTFS write support for Knoppix is under discussion on Knoppix Ideas forum and it looks that Knopper will include Captive into Knoppix 3.4. The best part of Live CD with full NTFS write support is that it actually exists in LinuxDefender, a remastered Knoppix distribution made by Bitdefender, presented at LinuxConf 2003, the annual Romanian Linux Users Group (RLUG) conference."

6 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Nope by Nasarius · · Score: 3, Informative

    As always, NTFS read-only works fine, writing is very limited unless you want to corrupt your filesystem. Knoppix would be using an approach that uses Microsoft's ntfs.sys to handle writing. Of course, you need Windows installed (or at least a copy of ntfs.sys) for this to work.

    --
    LOAD "SIG",8,1
    1. Re:Nope by Josh+Booth · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well... I just downloaded 2.6.1 and the help note in menuconfig says that nobody has had any problem with the NTFS writing, since it is limited to not changing the file size or creating new files. This is different from earlier kernels which pretended that they knew how to write NTFS and would actually mess up your partition. It says they have no reports of corruption, though :-)

  2. Re:Legality? by Nasarius · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not a DLL, but yeah, it's Microsoft's driver. The trick is that Knoppix isn't distributing this file, but rather searching your Windows partition for it.

    --
    LOAD "SIG",8,1
  3. Re:what I still don't understand sbout Knoppix... by Spoing · · Score: 3, Informative

    Knoppix uses the Kudzu libs to do hardware detection; the same as Red Hat Linux and Fedora.

    --
    A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
  4. Re:Using microsoft programs in Captive. by jonadab · · Score: 5, Informative

    > It says they use ntfs.sys and even ntoskrnl.exe from your XP partition.
    > Wondering if there are legal problems with this.

    One supposes that if you have an NTFS partition with these files on it, the
    files are licensed for you to use and therefore legal. (If not, you have a
    problem that goes beyond captive-ntfs.) Unless there is some specific
    verbiage in the EULA that expressly prohibits use of the drivers when the
    NT kernel isn't running, or some such restriction, I'm not sure what the
    legal problem would be. I find it difficult to imagine that the MS legal
    team would have dreamed up that kind of restriction, since it's not the sort
    of thing they would expect people to do. What happens when the EULA is
    revised is another matter, but this would have to get on the MS radar for
    that to happen, which will take at least a year, then another six months or
    so until the next update/revision cycle, and hopefully by then the native
    read/write NTFS support in the 2.6 kernel will be of such quality as to make
    the whole point moot.

    --
    Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
  5. Re:Using microsoft programs in Captive. by irgu · · Score: 4, Informative
    > Capabilities aren't part of quality?

    They are. But NTFS is a huge project. It takes a lot of time. Today it's developed as a hobby, couple of hours a week or not even that much.

    > I would really like to think that in a few months
    > someone will figure out how to (safely) lift these restrictions

    The developers said in the forums: somebody having lots of time must start active coding (no need for reverse engineering any more) or hire coders and finance the development.