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Linux Patch Clears the Air For Use of Microsoft's FAT Filesystem
Ars Technica is reporting that a new kernel patch may provide a workaround to allow use of Microsoft's FAT file system on Linux without paying licensing fees. "Andrew Tridgell, one of the lead developers behind the Samba project, published a patch last week that will alter the behavior of the Linux FAT implementation so that it will not generate both short and long filenames. In situations where the total filename fits within the 11-character limit, the filesystem will generate only a short name. When the filename exceeds that length, it will only generate a long name and will populate the short name value with 11 invalid characters so that it is ignored by the operating system."
Good Work!
'Impossible' is a word that humans use far too often. -- Seven of Nine
Maybe, maybe for something like a thumb drive, but on a hard drive?
Or maybe I'm just scarred by microsoft's implementation of it...
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Is FAT used for anything other than USB drives?
When I read this my first impression, though admittedly not an informed one, was "you mean people pay to use FAT?" I wish patents were more like trademarks, where if you don't vigorously defend them and instead let them go for a while, you lose them and they become public domain. Wouldn't that be nice, to get rid of all these situations as well as all of the "submarine patents" in one fell swoop?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It's used for yo' momma.
Sorry, low-hanging fruit.
As a long-time user of Linux who is currently using Microsoft Windows XP, the whole vfat (FAT with Win95 long file names) patent and how Microsoft has handled this patent makes me feel that maybe Microsoft is engaging in the same kind of monopolistic behavior that they engaged in when they destroyed Netscape in the 1990s.
I'm sure people know about Microsoft's patent violation lawsuit against TomTom; if you don't the Wikipedia is your friend. What a lot of people don't know is that Microsoft made some changes to Vista so that you can no longer easily use an unpatented filesystem like ext2 (Linux's 1990s file system which nicely enough is supported in Windows with a couple of different 3rd party drivers).
For me, it seems very suspicious that Microsoft made some changes to Vista that make it very difficult to use filesystems not patented by Microsoft around the same time they used licenses for their filesystems as a revenue source.
I posted a blog about this back in March and to quote that blog entry:
To allow USB drives, cameras, SD cards and more to work out of the box under Linux. With this patch you can distribute Linux without the fear of Microsoft suing you (like the did with TomTom)
Is FAT used for anything other than USB drives?
You say that like that's a small thing.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
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I wonder how long it will be before the FOSS community has to start writing patches for Mono to make it patent safe?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Media players. Hard drives, in computers where there are multiple OS's. Industrial equipment controllers. I bet you even some satellites use FAT.
It's ubiquitous because it's simple and until the NTFS drivers were fixed(read:not trashing your data), FAT was one of the only convenient formats for sharing data between Windows and Linux.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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Is FAT used for anything other than USB drives?
Dozens of devices use it. Cameras, GPS, if it has files most likely it uses FAT.
So when the file can fit in 8.3, it is saved as such, and when it can't, the long file name is saved in the directory, but a corresponding short name is created with a bunch of bogus random garbage. TFA doesn't explain what happens with mixed-case 8.3 filenames (VFAT long names would be case-preserving, but it may not be a great idea to use mixed-case in 8.3 directory entries), and that would be interesting to know.
The only real problem I can see if you name stuff with long names (or maybe use mixed-case short names) and then try to use them with equipment old enough to only support 8.3 names, or equipment that only supports 8.3 names to avoid the VFAT patent.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Are you honestly that dense? That's like asking if CD drives are used for anything other than CDs.
Flash drives have replaced floppies as the primary small rewritable data storage medium. Not supporting them is as egregious as not supporting DVDs, which incidentally have issues that are on sturdier legal ground.
they want their obsolete file system back
FAT is needed to support embedded hardware that presents itself as a USB mass storage device to the host, or that has to talk to flash memory devices.
Not much, but "USB Drives" covers a lot of devices. Most MP3 players and digital picture frames behave as USB drives, so do some satnav devices.
If this patch is ever widely deployed, Microsoft will change their operating system to recognize and reject it. They won't admit to any intention even after the fact -- it was only a bug.
What am I missing here ?
Will Groklaw one day be reporting about MSFT v. SPI ?
It shouldn't have had to be done.
This patent really smells of anti-trust to me since the only good reason to use it is for compatibility with Microsoft's products.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I found that for anything that could use NTFS, there is also an EXT2/EXT3 driver (that not only works better, but was more easily available earlier). It's just that a lot of Windows people don't think of EXT2.
My rule of thumb:
if the drive is under 120GB, I use FAT32, over, I use EXT2.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Hmm. So we jump through hoops to work around Microsoft IP for an obsolete decades old thing like FAT. What does that make Mono? A really really bad idea? A bug factory for future IP workaround and "you're sooo screwed" pain? A "here's an arm and a neck - twist either whenever you wish"? "Balmer, feudal lord of linux, we hereby place our lives and honor, and those of our descendants, into your hands, and those of your heirs"? "Linux - it's illegal (but Microsoft is turning a blind eye to it this week)"?
Does anyone seriously think that if at some future time, arm twisting manufacturers and lying to customers isn't sufficient, Microsoft won't fight us using IP?
C# is an ECMA/ISO standard. Linux vfat drivers are reverse engineered.
... they patented a workaround for their own broken design (!), used their monopoly power to force everyone into using it as well, and are suing people over that now. Damn, these people are smart!
Unrelatedly, doesn't anyone else find this part a little frightening: "The garbage string is generated with random bytes in a manner that is intended to minimize the risk of triggering that bug."
we stop using proprietary filesystems from microsoft, stop making them less lethal to linux, and start making it easier for normal everyday people to stop using them too! a sanitizing program for thumb drives that converts your fat data to EXT perhaps?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
However, ext2 isn't that much better than FAT (no journal, for example) and the various Windows ext2 IFSes only work reasonably well in most circumstances - however, I did encounter situations where a certain Windows-IFS-volume combination wouldn't work reliably. Plus, NTFS has better compatibility than ext2 as there is no usable ext2 implementation for Mac OS.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Hopefully, soon, we can start using UDF instead of FAT. Cross-OS compatibility is pretty much there, though FAT's support is still the most broad.
This sounds dangerous to me. What if someone uses this to write to an SSD card that they plug into some cheap portable device (a media player for example) that doesn't implement the "standard" properly and gets confused by the data in the short filename when a long one is present? Or refuses to read half the files because it only likes short names (some cheap Chinese import MP3 players just use the short filename in displays) and half the files have names too long? The user won't blame their crap cheap little portable device they paid $3 for on eBay, they'll blame that there Linux thing because their copy of Windows can write things so the player understands.
We need to fight back and stop fulfilling http requests from anything Microsoft. Hell even go deep enough to determin the OS. If you run MS, good luck using the web. Microsoft needs a smackdown, and there is enough of us out there that administer websites and such that we could have a huge impact. It's time to tell Microsoft, "free FAT or no web for you!"
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Patents cover independently derived solutions. Most of the c# patents probably cover Java anyway. MS also hold a host of patents related to HTML. I am not planning to stop using it till they sue me.
You may want to ask the North American population that one, as FAT is a lot more common in the North American population than say, the European population.
I don't see any indication that UDF supports journaling or anything else to maintain filesystem integrity--is that the case? If this is true, I don't see how it will be suitable for general filesystem use....
Are you honestly that dense? That's like asking if CD drives are used for anything other than CDs.
I'm sorry, but what else are CD drives used for? If it's used for DVDs, Blue-ray disks, or anything else, it's not a CD drive, it's a DVD drive, Blue-ray disk drive, or something by some other name, such as "combo drive." CD stands for "Compact Disk" which is not music specific. Unless you're talking about using it as a cupholder....
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
Only portions of C# crud are ISO standards. The .netrash and other items are not, thus are infestations that need to be banned from linux.
1311393600 - Back to Black
I use FAT on my usb keys only because I want to be able to use them from Windows machines.
But in Windows Vista+ you can also format USB flash drives to UDF (you’ll have to use the command line FORMAT tool, the GUI frontend won’t show UDF as an option).
When formatted in UDF, the drive’s performance improves dramatically: on my usb key, untarring the linux kernel and then deleting it changed from taking a few hours to taking a few minutes.
UDF can be read/written under Linux and, unlike NTFS, it natively supports all UNIX features (including extended attributes), so for example you could boot Linux straight from a Windows-accessible USB drive without creating ext3 images on it, and without using userspace file system drivers.
So it could be a nice solution for Linux/Windows interoperability... but sadly Windows stops liking UDF file systems if Linux creates files on them (I don’t know what exactly makes Windows upset; when it happens, Windows’ CHKDSK says the file system is OK).
This will break the myriad of read-only implementations out there that only use short names, which is a lot more than you'd think. This means this can't be enabled by default on your average Linux.
It might help TomTom and the like, but it's not a cure for the patented portions of FAT. It's just a hack that might help some specific implementors. Kudos to the kernel developers for doing their best, but the real solution is to get the bogus patents invalidated.
I second that, anything that's obvisouly linux-based and touts "NTFS support" can handle EXT2/3.
The last thing I tried was a Tvix Dvico m6500a, a media player/recorder that "requires" NTFS for recording.
It works perfectly well with Ext3.
So was RAMBUS.
It's called a "patent ambush"
It's warm and I'm tired but I think it goes like this:
Step 1. Join standards committee and learn all there is to learn about competitors
Step 2. Patent something in such a way that you know your competitors infringe
Step 3. Leave standards committee so you're no longer held by its rules
Step 4. 15 years later ( 20 years), sue their pants off
Step 5. ??
Step 6. Profit!
It may be an strategic choice from MS. Preventing people from use other filesystems will lock you to Windows. In the other hand, releasing a development kit to users for free (as in beer) would help them increase the user base, and thus selling more Windows copies. A better explanation here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
I hate signatures
Um, FAT doesn't have those things either.
My point was that unlike FAT, UDF isn't a proprietary standard, but is nearly as widely supported, making it suitable for the same classes of devices as which currently use FAT.
note however that anything older then vista do not have write support.
but its a interesting thought non the less...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I don't see any indication that UDF supports journaling or anything else to maintain filesystem integrity--is that the case? If this is true, I don't see how it will be suitable for general filesystem use....
Yeah, but if it's to be used as a replacement for FAT...
Bow-ties are cool.
That's fair.
But if we're going to move to something, it would be nice if that something were more advanced than FAT/UDF. I guess there are two perspectives:
1) Things you'll do on your own. You can already format drives as UDF if you like, as long as you're only using systems which support it (lots of them do per your Wiki link.)
2) Things that we want other people to do. This one is much harder--it's hard to get people to change. Are flash drive makers going to change from FAT to UDF? If so, wouldn't it be nicer if they could change to something better?
Wishful thinking, I guess.
If they haven't yet sued Google over supposed HTML patent infringements then I think you are safe. That is, unless they are waiting to build a case against the entire internet. Oh god...
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Did anyone care to think what will happen if Microsoft decides to 'fix' their chkdsk.exe so it deletes all these 'corrupted' files with 'corrupted' short filenames?
Yeah Microsoft is really going to drop it's ISO standards it worked so hard to get just so it can fuck over some toy operating system. Get real.
Let's suppose a new version of Windows started checking whether files with long filenames also had short filenames - and when encountering such a file, popped up a dialog saying "your filesystem may be corrupt. Please run scandisk" or whatever.... Wouldn't that be fun?
Bow-ties are cool.
Not true at all; I've been using ext2/ext3 partitions with OS X for quite some time now via macfuse and fuse-ext2. I still don't really use it for my usb sticks though. Much as I dislike FAT it is the one fs I can use with any computer I end up at without having to download anything.
Caveat Utilitor
zealot much?
If so, wouldn't it be nicer if they could change to something better?
Depends what you mean by "better" - for many situations where FAT is used, you don;t *want* stuff like journalling because you're dealing with very low power embedded systems.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
"Plus, NTFS has better compatibility than ext2 as there is no usable ext2 implementation for Mac OS." Isn't that the fault of the developers for Mac OS? Seriously, it's not like the source code is available everywhere and completely for free or anything...
The poster to whom I originally replied mentioned cross-OS compatibility. I think the scope was pretty clear at that point.
It's not FAT; it's just big-boned.
Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
Then why would you want them to be FAT?
(SFNDE = Short File Name Directory Entry)
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Regarding the patent filed in 1993.
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It seems that the aim is to implement a "different idea" than that expressed in Figure 6b. (free rego at freepatentsonline to see original PDF with figures)
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What about all the references to "short filename including at most a maximum NUMBER OF CHARACTERS THAT IS PERMISSIBLE BY THE OPERATING SYSTEM."
Is the Linux Operating System limited to a only of 8.3 characters? To that effect, why does this patent apply to Linux at all?
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I can't quite remember my history, but weren't long filenames (LFN) introduced with Windows 95 in 1995? Wasn't Win95 just a GUI layer on top of DOS and so bound by the filename length contraint of the DOS "OPERATING SYSTEM"? Wasn't it actually the Win95 GUI that interpreted and displayed the LFN?
Isn't Linux access to FAT different?
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Even though the FAT filesystem was limited to 8.3 characters, don't you think that DOS was "hardcoded" to 8.3 characters. Thus it was a constraint of the "Operating System" that this patent was addressing. The Linux situation seems completely different. Linux does not have this constraint, thus the Linux "idea" for implemeting dual directory entries is different than the "idea" for Windows GUI on DOS as expressed in the given patent - ie thus the "idea" for Linux is compatability, whereas the "idea" for Windows was to get around the 8.3 constraint.
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Fig 2 shows LFNDE alongside SFNDE. Is that required technically for compatability, or can they be stored apart?
Alternatively ONLY create long filename, then have some sweeper task come along and create the short filenames from the long ones.
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It talks about only creating a LFN when it is longer than 8.3.
Well then, create a LFNDE "EVERY TIME".
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The patent says "At a minimum, a short filename will be created."
Have linux do it differently, at a minimum create both a long and a short filename.
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The patent describes using "both SFN APIs and LFN APIs".
Does linux have both or does it do it "differently" with just LFN APIs?
Sure~1
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
The poster to whom I originally replied mentioned cross-OS compatibility. I think the scope was pretty clear at that point.
UDF is pretty well supported isn't it?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Often, in this case, it's not just multiple OSes that need to access the filesystem, but also embedded devices. Think digital cameras, GPSes, that sort of thing, where the overhead of a journaling filesystem is pretty overkill, but it still needs to be accessed by full-blown OSes.
FAT is perfect for those devices, due to its lack of features.
I don't see how Microsoft enforcing patents and having a proprietary file system is somehow being a monopoly. If I'm driving a Ford, and I decide to put in another transmission, I'm not going to be able to go out and put a Chevy transmission in. Should I sue Ford because I have to use a Ford transmission in it instead of being able to just put anything in it? Of course not.
> Don't know about you, but I like my USB drives to be small things.
You know, just for the sheer absurdity of it, somebody ought to make a Flash-ROM-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device that's too large to carry in a C-130. Perhaps it could feature an indicator light with a higher lux rating than an airport beacon and be powered by an internal nuclear reactor.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Wrong. vfat is not reverse-engineered. Microsoft documented it quite well enough to implement both it and FAT. You may be thinking of NTFS.
Also nobody is concerned about the C# language itself, but about the *libraries* that programs use. You are basically claming that there is no problem cloning Windows because most software for it uses C++.
Hmm. Last time I tried I couldn't get fuse-ext2 to work. Maybe things have changed since then (quite possible as (Mac)FUSE isn't exactly stagnant).
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
A lot of UDF implementations don't support random access in write mode. Unless that changes, it's not really useful for most of the things FAT is used for. Needing to erase the whole filesystem and rewrite it every time you change a file is totally unacceptable for a lot of applications.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It looks like someone has forgotten that what is good for one's self is not necessarily good for everyone else.
It may be the best solution for Linux advocates, but it is probably not the best solution for the device manufacturers. 90% of their market uses Windows. If the manufacturers moved to a "new vendor-neutral format", they would break the automatic compatibility with 90% of their market and they would also have to ship driver disks to install the drivers needed to read and write the new format with every device. This would increase the cost of manufacturing and packaging as well as make it harder to use the devices.
Perhaps Linux supporters should stop being so self-centered and start thinking of the larger picture before making such statements.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Media players. Hard drives, in computers where there are multiple OS's. Industrial equipment controllers. I bet you even some satellites use FAT.
It's ubiquitous because it's simple and until the NTFS drivers were fixed(read:not trashing your data), FAT was one of the only convenient formats for sharing data between Windows and Linux.
My university's satellite uses ext2. I only know that because I had the chance to play with the mock satellite (full sized copy of the one in orbit) recently. But as the sat is running embedded Linux, it makes sense.
Thank for reading to the sig. You may stop reading now. It is safe. There is no more content. Why are you still reading?
The patent is (or should not be) on the obvious parts of the system. There is a clever thing in VFAT, in that they use hidden "volume label" directory entries to store the long name, and this work-around does not change that.
This is not just long filenames (unless the patent system is broken much worse than anybody thinks). It is blatently obvious how to add long filename support to a file system that has short filenames. However the "obvious" solution would be to use a single hidden file to store all the names. Microsoft chose another solution, and for a good reason (their solution has an advantage that if an "old" system deletes all the files in a directory, the directory looks empty. A hidden file would either be too easy to delete by accident or would be "locked" and thus the old system would be unable to empty the directory).
It is also blatently obvious that an 8.3 replacement filename must be made for the file, so that can't be patented. They may have patented the pattern but I'm fairly certain that any unique pattern of characters with the same extension would not break any software (they could have made a system where "part" of the long filename is stored in the 8.3 name, but they did not because they were probably worried about handling collisions of these short names, or just rushed with their implementation).
So I really don't see how this works around the actually patentable part of this, since the use of volume label directory entries is still being done.
It also appears that *reading* the long filenames is allowed without a license. So anybody can read these disks.
My suggestion would be to use a new method to store the long names. Users of Windows looking at the disk would see only the short names. People say that the users will blame Linux for that, but they are seriously underestimating the stupidity of users, they will blame the Windows machine, since when they put the disk back in the Linux machine the filenames work!
Yeah, my experience is is doesn't work "as advertised". But if you type "sudo mkdir /Volumes/foo && sudo fuse-ext2 /dev/disk0s3 -o force" /dev/disk0s3 will be mounted rw on /Volumes/foo, and writing a script to do that at boot time is trivial.
Caveat Utilitor
Mono is a virus introduced not by mosquitoes or fleas, but by coders whose ambitions conflict with the interests of their current host. When it dies, they will just move on to the next host without a care.
> why ... would we trust them with C# ?
We don't.
> What am I missing here ?
Perhaps you're missing the fact that there are only about a dozen people in the open-source community who want anything to do with Mono, for exactly this reason. Nothing of any consequence uses it.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Another reason to not use any fat.
The Linux Foundation says that the best solution at this point is for vendors to ditch FAT and come up with a new vendor-neutral format that can be used without having to pay licensing fees.
I completely agree with this. Don't hack a quasi-FAT implementation; make a new file system that can be used for all devices because it's open source. Designs can be open source just as much as code, and that lets people use them to do things, instead of keeping us ghettoized within legal constraints.
Futurist Traditionalism
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What if someone uses this to write to an SSD card that they plug into some cheap portable device (a media player for example) that doesn't implement the "standard" properly
The OEM buys a license for FAT - capped at $250K, last I heard.
FAT is so common and so useful, that, from his point of view, it's money well spent.
If you are SONY or Panasonic and bought the license in 2003 your costs are a small fraction of a penny per unit. You don't need the hack.
The current implementation works perfectly well. No one gains anything by writing junk data.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
How does the "interop" argument work for patents? If you implement something for interop, does it infringe on patents? Nowadays all FAT uses are probably just for interop.
UDF is big and complex. FAT is small and simple.
Thus FAT gets used on embedded systems, and UDF doesn't get used much anywhere, except general purpose operating systems, and even then generally only read support. If you want compatibility you need to stick to the early versions of UDF, the versions without the interesting features, leaving you with something not significantly better than the more ubiquitous ISO-9660.
Reading the thread to the end before replying, FTW!
Ooops, should have been "sudo mkdir /Volumes/foo && sudo fuse-ext2 /dev/disk0s3 /Volumes/foo -o force".
Caveat Utilitor
Not quite useful for an external disk intended to be shared with other computers, though.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I apologize for not using a simple car analogy. Asking if vfat is used for anything other than flash drives is like asking if windows are required for anything other than keeping out the rain while still retaining some vision. Well, yes, of course, but isn't that enough?
What? I only use ext3. What is this FAT you speak of? ;)
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Then why would you want them to be FAT?
So they don't fall down the side of the couch too easily?
Because "it just works" and does so with just about everything.
Using more advanced file systems than FAT will limit your flexibility and sentence you to serious frustration when helping that person with Win98 or that semi-cute girl with a Mac.
FAT32 and bellow is not designed for flash media. I would prefer to see the same Linux workaround for exFAT or FAT64 instead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
Depends on what other computers you mean, I suppose. Of course it doesn't replace FAT on a usb drive if you have to access the data from machines you don't have admin rights on, but otherwise it certainly works just fine.
When I read this my first impression, though admittedly not an informed one, was "you mean people pay to use FAT?"
No they don't. At least, nobody I've ever heard of. Also, do US patents apply to imported software? Say, I download OpenBSD from [insert patent-free country here], then I use that to build my own product, am I infringing?
Yes. Because patents do not have anything to do with distribution. That is governed by copyright. So it does not matter if you buy it, download it or write it your self. If it does what is described in the patent, you are infringing.
As far as 'little people' paying to use FAT? Not directly. Its not worth the time or the bad PR to hunt up every end-user and shake them down for some FAT money. Their money is aggregated by device manufacturers. Cameras, video players, mobile phones, etc all use FAT. It's easier to shake down a few dozen manufacturers with deep pockets than a few hundreds of thousands of end users.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
why the f*** would we trust them with C# ??
Maybe because:
a) the patents on VFAT actually exist, while the patents on C#, at this point, don't seem to actually exist (I've yet to see either a patent or a filing covering C#, the language, or the .NET framework, and not a single Mono opponent I've come across has been able to cite one),
b) given that, they can't exist because you can't retroactively patent a published invention, and
c) thus the only possibility is MS deliberately submarining their filings, which would disallow them from filing their patents overseas and would shorten the protection time, which makes it incredibly unlikely that such patents actually exist.
Step 4. 15 years later ( 20 years), sue their pants off
That doesn't work anymore. If they did that in the US, their patents would've expired, as they expire 20 years after the filing date.
Every storage media uses a FAT. The word is an acronym for File Allocation Table. I guess you mean the MSDOS FAT system that Microsoft made ubiquitous back in the day. NTFS is a type of FAT. UDF is a type of FAT designed for optical media.
Microsoft tried to copyright their type of FAT and even copyright the acronym but there was too much prior art to pull it off.
Just another skirmish in the battle of compatibility vs proprietary.
The evolution of file allocation algorithms has been to be able to address larger and larger volumes and with more descriptive file names.
CP/M (and MSDOS) started with a 6+3 scheme and UNIX (Linux) with an 8+4 scheme for naming files. (file name plus type extension)
Remember your basics...
NRRPT/RCT
That would be good if you could use the windows FAT file system. Currently the best i do is use the WINE emulator . I also use dual boot, but it is awkward to reboot, when you want to switch between operating systems.
HAAAAAAAAAAA! Linux infringed a patent.
i am sure MS's other 200+ claims are also true.