Slashdot Mirror
FUSE Port Brings NTFS Support To OS X
sciurus0 writes "In his session at Macworld on OS X filesytems, Google's Amit Singh announced that he has ported Linux's FUSE module to OS X. The port is called MacFUSE and it is available in source form and as a pre-compiled kernel extension with associated tools. Many FUSE filesystems such as sshfs and ntfs-3g are reported to work."
GmailFS should also now be easily supported on Mac OS X using MacFuse.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Try http://fuse.sourceforge.net/ - basically, when I hear of an Open Source project I've not heard of before, I just go to "nameofprojectgoeshere.sourceforge.net", and (more often than not) there it is. And there it was.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
...Miklos Szeredi was offered a job by SUSE Labs, Prague, which he accepted. His job will be kernel developement for SUSE (all GPL, of course). IIRC, he can work on FUSE in 10% of his work time.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
The original NTFS-3G source code doesn't compile on Mac OS X without some changes but the MacFUSE and NTFS-3G precompiled packages are available from IUseThis.
Filesystems in Windows are a different animal to what they are in other OS's.. *way* harder. If you ever checkout the ntfsd list you'll see how many odd cases you have to handle because people make this mistake almost daily (oddly enough most of them are trying to do encryption).
Mount_ntfs doesn't have full read/write possibility. NTFS-3G has and it's commonly used on Linux.
FUSE is a general Filesystem-in-userspace driver, supporting a long list of filesystems.
So with FUSE ported, Windows users can also enjoy in-filesystem versioning, seamless ssh integration, RAR files as folders and so on.
...ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Well, FUSE is not NTFS. FUSE allows you to write userspace filesystem modules via stable and fairly simple API. Thus if you had FUSE for Windows, you could add new filesystems to Windows with relative ease. Also you could port the same modules to Mac, Linux and BSD or vice versa.
- Raynet --> .
I was waiting for the sshfs support on Mac OS X for a long time.
Thanks Google, you did us OS X users a great favorite!
I'm not sure about NetBSD and OpenBSD, but then fusefs support is already in FreeBSD.
By the way, I have decided not to upgrade my OS X until Apple includes out-of-the-box sshfs (that's the one I used the most among those built on top of fuse) support into new version of the OS.
Macs running OS X have built-in Windows file sharing -- you can share files from the Mac and you can connect to Windows network-shares. Windows Active Directory and VPN might complicate things a bit, but offer no more problems from a Mac than they do from the average Windows PC.
As for sharing an external hard drive, while Macs only read NTFS volumes, they can both read and write to FAT32 volumes which are compatible with Windows as well. There are, however, limitations to FAT32 such as the 2GB maximum file-size which might make that a less-than-optimum solution.
Another alternative is to purchase a commercial product such as MacDrive, which allows Windows PC's to access hard drives that have been initialized with the Mac (HFS+) file system.
I saw that definition when I first heard about FUSE and thought "Okay, so what's userspace?" For those who don't know: Userspace is the thing you're using right now. Rather than having the filesystem buried down deep in the bowels of the system, FUSE puts it above most of the stuff the OS does. That way, you can tell the OS things like "See those collection of Gmail messages to myself or RAR files or tarballs? That's a filesystem. You can move stuff onto and off of it just like another disk." FUSE is an easy, open source way of writing things that use unconventional storage methods for files.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Sure, no writing, but that's why you convert all your drives to HFS+
That's kind of a huge limitation. There are lots of times when you might want to share a drive back and forth between a Windows and Mac machine, and it's not possible or desirable to run MacDrive on the Windows side (and having for format the drive with FAT32 sucks mightily).
Letting the Mac understand NTFS is a good thing, because it provides for more interoperability. The only downside to it, is that it might cause people to think of NTFS as a good inter-operable standard, rather than the disgusting, proprietary, Redmond Albatross that it is.
Plus, being able to use SSH as a filesystem is pretty slick, and will probably get more use than the NTFS part. KDE's implementation of SSH-as-filesystem (called fish://) is darned slick, and I've always thought that Apple was missing out by not having something like it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."