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Plethora of New User Space Filesystems For Mac OS X
DaringDan writes "As part of the recent MacFUSE 2.0 release Amit Singh has added support for an insane number of filesystems on the Mac. This video from Google and this blog post pretty much explain everything in detail but to sum-up Singh has written a new filesystem called AncientFS which lets you mount a ton of UNIX file formats starting from the very first version of UNIX. Even more interesting is that they have also taken Linux kernel implementations of filesystems like ufs, sysv-fs, minix-fs and made them work in user-space on the Mac, which means its now possible to read disks from OSes like FreeBSD, Solaris and NeXT on OS X. ext2/ext3 don't seem to be on the list but apparently the source for everything is provided, so hopefully some enterprising soul can apply the same techniques to ext2. One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
What is needed is an ext3 implementation. There've been projects to bring ext2/3 to the Mac, but so far they've been incomplete and abandoned.
I'm actually pretty surprised that this hasn't been properly implemented already.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Because slashdot isn't a public service announcement system and macfuse is more interesting?
I'd say that what's interesting and what's not interesting is all a matter of opinion, but it stands to reason that if you own a Mac and would be interested in this software, you would also be interested in knowing that a recently released update from Apple is causing major system trouble.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Some users installing third party apps that modify their system files, and then apply updates over them have issues is hardly newsworthy.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
If by "works" you mean "i have a 10.3 panther PPC machine and need non-journaling access to an ext3 partition", or "i have a tiger/leopard Intel machine and don't care if my machine suddenly panics". Those are the choices at the moment.
It's curious really, this is a filesystem for which the spec is very well known, implementations are available fully open source, and yet here we are with unmaintained and unstable projects that are alpha quality for both OS X and Windows. The drivers for Windows ext2/3 support cause bluescreens under various conditions, so yea those are alpha too.
External hard drives, for one. I have some external drives I use on Linux boxes for various things. All of these boxes are up in an air conditioned server room. On occasion I need to get one file off onto my workstation, which is a Mac. Currently I have to walk it up to server room, connect it up, go back down, shell into the machine and mount it (if it's not an automounted drive), then somehow get the file out of the linux box to my Mac (scp or something). If I could just mount it on my workstation, it would save a lot of time.
Additionally, there are occasions where a recovery process needs to be run on a bad drive. The same procedure applies. It's mainly a convenience thing, but it would make the Mac into a much more useful tool for admins. I can definitely see the usefulness for FAT/NTFS in a desktop support environment.
Naturally you can always comment "Why use a Mac in the first place when you could have a linux desktop?" but I would reply that I don't have a choice, the CEO only buys Macs for workstations. So I have to use what I've got. This would make my life easier.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
You most certainly can if you want to. But if you have system files A and B and you modify B and later system update modifies A to call something in B that you changed the behavior of, then don't blame the system update.
That's all I'm saying.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
you mean BARELY causing? I am sorry but a hundred or so postings when there are over a million OS 10.5 users out there is NOT in my mind major trouble.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."