My next challenge is getting NTFS for Linux to work. As it turns out, there are two ways to go about this. One is by installing the NTFS kernel module, which only allows for reading. This is only half useful, though. Writing is fairly important, as well. Apparently, though, NTFS is sufficiently complex enough that making this a safe proposition has taken years -- and even now, although it's safe, it doesn't work 100% of the time (but it does work safely, according to the authors).

So, my first step was to install the kernel module so it was available for simple and quick mounting. This is easy enough, although yum didn't choose the correct package first, so I had to do a list and find the right package name that matched with my kernel (2.6.15) (which had to be updated first, anyway). I now have "kernel-module-ntfs-2.6.15" installed. This allows me to mount an NTFS partition exactly like any other -- but it will only ever mount read-only. These modules were available via livna.

Now for writing, which the Linux-NTFS project is working on. This method involves doing a user level mount via ntfsmount. This means it's a bit slower than running at the kernel level, but it adds support for writing.

The website wants you to install FUSE and then ntfsprogs. I found that FUSE was available via yum, so I installed that version. I then downloaded and installed ntfsprogs-fuse-1.12.1-1.i586.rpm from their website figuring that I could save a step. Well, I also had to install the plain ntfsprogs-1.12.1-1.i586.rpm first. After doing that and installing fuse via yum, ntfsprogs-fuse still wouldn't install. This is perhaps because it only had i586 versions and I'm on an i686 platform. Off to download the source and compile, like the instruactions show. Well, this means also downloading gcc and installing it (luckily, yum is easy with this one).

This then gave the following error even though I have 2.4.2 of FUSE:

configure: error: Linux-NTFS FUSE module requires FUSE version >= 2.3.0.

And that's where I'm at now, having decided to wait on this and instead setup Firefox extensions. I don't think I actually need NTFS support, especially only partially working support. I think for internal disks and archives where I might want to store files larger than 4GB I'll use ext3 and all of the other ones already have the limitations of FAT32, so they'll keep working out alright.

(Actually, I don't think I'm all that far from being able to get this to work, but I don't really care all that much. :) )

UPDATE: As it turns out, the only thing I was doing wrong was that I had only installed fuse and not also fuse-devel ("yum install fuse-devel" solved that).

Now I have the 'ntfsmount' command available to use. See, I actually found that I did, in fact, need this for writing because all of my external disks were also NTFS formatted. Whoops. :)

Posted by Shane on February 20, 2006 5:38 PM | Permalink