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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.
I'm writing FUSE for Windows at my spare time (not much of it, unfortunately). Is there anybody who's doing the same?
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.
Boot camp users, care to comment on the implications?
.: Max Romantschuk
This is great news! Finally, there's an easy way to develop filesystems for multiple operating systems. Maybe I'll pick up my netfs project again now. Anyone working on porting FUSE to *BSD?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I use it everyday...
/sbin/mount_ntfs
# which mount_ntfs
Um... maybe by "last I checked" you mean the 1990s?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I usually recommend ext2 on external disks that are to be used seamlessly between windows/linux/mac environments. Works like a charm! Ref. http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ http://www.fs-driver.org/
Just go to sharing in system preferences and click for enable windows sharing.
Job done. It even tells you where to point your windows pc to.
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!
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.
How about ext3 support on Intel macs? I tried the sourceforge project about a year ago and it didn't work.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The two worst-connected computers I currently use are my Mac Plus and my TRS-80. It seems like neither one will connect to Windows 3.0. I'm not even sure where I'm supposed to stick the ethernet thingy.
Next time I'm buying the Commodore 128 or something else that can run GEOS!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
I love fuse it makes so many things so much easier.
mainly I use "sshfs". but the biggest problem I have is the same problem I have with KDE-IOSlaves.
is that you can't really chain them
It makes it easy to Open a Zip/Rar file as a folder, and it makes it easy to treat an FTP server as a folder. but what about a Zip File on an FTP server?
I just wish there was some easy way to allow the FTP/SSH file systems to recognize that a Zip File as folder.
or chain to Zip with Encryption.
or Encryption with Subversion.
all at the file system level.
any way thats my rant, but the FUSE effort is brilliant in general.
--meh--
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."
that's just the linux version. The Mac version is hosted by googleCode and its probibly going to be on the first page for a while, otherwise just search for macFuse.
I'm working on a Cocoa GUI for FUSE (currently called MacFusion). The idea is that it loads plugins for supported filesystems (working right now on SSHFS, NTFS-3G and FTPFS at first). The plugins provide a configuration interface and code to mount/unmount. I'm hoping that this GUI will make FUSE goodness easily accessible to non-technical non-console people. In the future, it should be simple to support encfs, gmailfs, etc. This will be a FOSS project once a first build is ready. Anyone who wants to help is welcome, as are suggestions of any kind on the features/interface.
On reading about this I decided to install it on my Mac and see what it gives. While a great advancement, this is still a work in progress and still very much something for people familiar with the command line. The aspect that would change all this the ability to use FUSE based FS URLs in the Finder ( known issue ), though this seems to be a limitation based on some private APIs needing to be made public, which I hope Apple resolves.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
For the Mac Plus, there was a SCSIethernet box you could get. Pretty straightforward installation.
For the TRS-80, your best bet may be running SLIP or PPP over a serial or parallel interface. Of course, viewing web pages in 128x64 block graphics might be something of a challenge.
Fortunately, Commodore 64/128's have an ethernet solution available. See http://www.dunkels.com/adam/tfe/
It's a great tool and one I have practical use for, but testing it out for work I've stumbled across what I consider to be an important issue. I've only tried SSHFS so far, and I haven't done any digging to see where the fault lies, but a dropped connection (either a dropped internet connection or an SSH session the server drops) really confuses the system. Messing about, I killed my internet connection during a read, and Finder hung until my the connection was restored. Another time, my session was killed for idleness by our server; when I tried to perform a read through Terminal, both Terminal and Finder crashed and took all of OS X with them.
If you're not flamebaiting then you probably want a serious answer. My guess is twofold:
- Mac has a culture of charging small amounts of money for software released commercially rather than open sourcing things (e.g. TextMate). This dates to before the OSX days.
- People writing code for Macs tend to use Cocoa because its the easiest way to do it and this doesn't port easily to other systems.
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