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 also

[Anonymous Coward]

GmailFS [jones.name] should also now be easily supported on Mac OS X using MacFuse.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:FUSE?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Can anone point out what 'FUSE' is?---I know i am lazy, no need to state the obvious.

Try http://fuse.sourceforge.net/ [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. :)

The creator of FUSE...

[little1973]

...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.

Precompiled read/write NTFS packages

[irgu]

The original NTFS-3G [ntfs-3g.org] source code doesn't compile on Mac OS X without some changes but the MacFUSE and NTFS-3G precompiled packages [iusethis.com] are available from IUseThis.

Re:Precompiled read/write NTFS packages

[Anonymous Coward]

http://oessex.blogspot.com/2007/01/ntfs-3g.html [blogspot.com]

Re:FUSE for Windows

[Tony Hoyle]

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).

Doh. mount_ntfs is already there

[Tetard]

I use it everyday...

# which mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs

Re:Doh. mount_ntfs is already there

[irgu]

Mount_ntfs doesn't have full read/write possibility. NTFS-3G [ntfs-3g.org] has and it's commonly used on Linux.

Re:FUSE for Windows

[odie_q]

FUSE is a general Filesystem-in-userspace driver, supporting a long list [sourceforge.net] of filesystems.

So with FUSE ported, Windows users can also enjoy in-filesystem versioning, seamless ssh integration, RAR files as folders and so on.

Re:Doh. mount_ntfs is already there

[slamb]

From the manpage, mount_ntfs(8) has significant limitations:

There is limited writing ability. Limitations: file must be nonresident and must not contain any sparces (uninitialized areas); compressed files are also not supported.

I can't seem to find a straight definition of "nonresident files" in the context of NTFS, but my best guess from glancing over google results is that "resident" files are ones which have their contents in a small block embedded in the inode itself. That'd be an optimization to minimize internal fragmentation on small files. If I'm right, a Windows-produced NTFS is likely to have a lot of these files. Not sure if OS X can't write to them at all, or if it will just make them non-resident when it does so.

Re:FUSE for Windows

[raynet]

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.

Re:good

[henrikba]

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/ [sourceforge.net] http://www.fs-driver.org/ [fs-driver.org]

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Great!

[jack_csk]

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!

Re:Great News!

[jack_csk]

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.

Re: Macs Do Speak Windows

[Telephone Sanitizer]

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.

Re:FUSE?

[Paulrothrock]

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.

Re:Great for dual booting?

[LEgregius]

I have bootcamp installed. I can already READ my ntfs partition from OS X. No write support. FUSE does have some write support, so that's handy. I may use it.

That's the problem.

[Kadin2048]

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:// [kde.org]) is darned slick, and I've always thought that Apple was missing out by not having something like it.

Re:FUSE?

[mehemiah]

that's just the linux version. The Mac version is hosted by googleCode [slashdot.org] and its probibly going to be on the first page for a while, otherwise just search for macFuse.

Re:The creator of FUSE...

[kobaz]

You did great up until you misspelled lose :(

Re:good

[CityZen]

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/ [dunkels.com]

Re:That's the problem.

[Guy Harris]

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.

FUSE isn't like it - in at least some ways, it's better. FUSE makes it work at the UN*X API level, which means that even non-KDE applications, such as grep, can use it.

Re:That's the problem.

[Kadin2048]

I think "works when SFTP won't" is the only other big advantage.

I did some quick Googling on the subject of Fish versus SFTP, and apparently: "The fish kio...relies [only] on the ssh [server] providing a unix shell, then it uploads a simple server program written in perl. A beautiful hack and handy if sftp is not available on your ssh server, but nowhere near the performance or reliability of sftp." From here [ubuntu.com].

So if the server you're connecting to supports SFTP, and you're only going to be doing file transfers, you might as well use it. But FISH will work even in situation were SFTP isn't supported, and your only way in is via SSH.