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Knoppix Variant Offers Full NTFS Write Support
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."
..is how it can offer better hardware detection and often better features than other, "commercial" Linux distros?
Anyone has internal information on how Knoppix is developed and maintained?
If I'm skimming the Captive homepage to quickly, but it seems to me like Captive is using Microsoft DLL's to read/write NTFS filesystems.
Seems to me like that would or will violate the Microsoft EULA and leave Knoppix users open to problems if MS changes parts of these DLLs in subsequent service packs or releases.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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
The new driver, introduced in 2.5.11, has some write code, but it's very limited. The driver can overwrite existing files, but it cannot change the length, add new or delete existing files.
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfs.html#3 .2
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
obviously no. If someone has a valid XP licence they should be allowed to use it in any way they wish to and this includes the NTFS driver.
> Allthough this will be extremely usefull for the people having to cope
> with ntfs, i'd rather wait until the kernel supports it fully (there's
> allready a "partial" driver in the kernel 2.6). But personally, i just
> stick to FAT32.
The usefulness of this is primarily geared toward situations where NTFS is
already extant (e.g., OEM installs of WinXP). In these scenerios, if you
want to multiboot and share data between the two OSes, use Knoppix as a
rescue system, or anything along those lines, you *need* read/write NTFS
support. You don't need this if you have your choice of filesystems,
because you can just use another filesystem, but if you are in a situation
where you need this, nothing else will do. So it's important. It's
especially important for Knoppix, which is often used as a rescue system;
now it can be used as a rescue system for NT/2K/XP, as well as for 9x/Me.
No, you wouldn't choose to use this on a new install when you have your choice
of filesystems. For that you'd pick Reiser or ext2/3 probably, or FAT for a
data partition in a multiboot scenerio (since that gives the best compatibility
and works with every major OS and most minor ones as well). But that's not the
intention of captive-ntfs. It's for working with existing filesystems.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> 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.
I hope accomplishing this didn't involve modifying undocumented internal structures.
Raymond Chen will be pissed.
Monstromart: Where shopping is a baffling ordeal
- Boot from CD to try it out.
- Convert to dual boot. There would be a utility to re-partition, install and configure for dual-boot. Let the user keep it dual-boot while they find substitutes for any Windows-only programs that Wine can't handle.
- Convert to Linux only
You could give these out like AOL disks and slowly convert the installed base. There could be a utility to detect existing win32 programs and check their status in the Wine application list.This would be the logical extension to Bruce Perens' UserLinux idea.
I don't think this really changes anything. They've always had the ability to single-step/reverse engineer the windows NTFS driver, it's not like they lacked that ability before. But that's a very daunting task, regardless of whether you do it in Windows or in Linux, because it's a complicated filesystem and the driver is pretty big. It's like saying, "Hey! We got these great new backpacks for our climb to the top of Everest! They're red instead of our old ones which were black. But otherwise they're the same model."
Now that there is reliable NTFS write support, maybe we could get a kernel modification to use the pagefile.sys as a swap partition.
mkswap
swapon
What about using the windows temp directory for storage of highly used apps and libs?
-metric
> I think it's important to note that the issue with the current Linux
> kernel's NTFS support is its capabilities, not its quality.
Capabilities aren't part of quality? Do you want a car that can't make right
turns? What about a car that can't make turns at all -- it would still be
fine for driving straight ahead, and you could even put it in reverse...
> It can only write to a file without increasing its size - and no creating
> or deleting files or directories.
This limits its usefulness in important ways. Not that it is if no value,
but I would really like to think that in a few months someone will figure
out how to (safely) lift these restrictions.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
However the EULA also states that any use of the software not expressly granted to the end user is reserved by Microsoft. This way Microsoft can say OK for friends and NO for competitors. Did you already forget when Microsoft threatened MS Visual FoxPro users some months ago who used the same trick?
Ditch Microsoft then no such troubles.
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.
I don't mean this a troll, but when has M$ ever cared about stabbing a "friend" in the back? They do it every time it becomes convenient. I remember a cellphone company story a while back who partnered with M$ and a last I heard, we suing for stealing technology as just one example.
obviously no. If someone has a valid XP licence they should be allowed to use it in any way they wish to and this includes the NTFS driver.
The flaw in your argument: use of "obviously" and "should" instead of giving a reason why Microsoft would allow this. (Allow? Yes. Until their EULA is declared illegal or void, it's a legally binding agreement with MS software users - even when it's stupid.)
Here's an example when you might want to use Captive....
You do video editing, XP has some good tools, Linux has some good tools. Video editing is best done on a file system that can handle large files like EXT2/3, Reiser, or NTFS (FAT 32 has a 4GB maximum file size)
Since XP doesn't support any of the Linux filesystems in read/write mode (at full speed) even with opensource add-on drivers there are 2 options for a video editor who wants to use both paltforms.
#1 buy 2 computers and network them and pass the project back and forth over the network
#2 format a common drive in NTFS, put the project on that drive and dual boot between XP and Linux using Captive in Linux to access the Filesystem in read/write mode at full speed.