The #Shell

Userspace Filesystem Drivers are becoming more and more popular since they’re portable and have less headache of platform specific filesystem driver issues. For example, NTFS-3G project provides the full read/write support for NTFS under Linux and MacOSX while living in userspace.

I recently discovered an open source project called “fuse-ext2” which is an implementation of Ext2/Ext3/Ext4 filesystem driver in userspace. Before this one, there was an ext2-only native kernel extension (kext) implementation. So I had no write access to my Ext3 and no read access to Ext4 file-system at all.

To use and enable experimental write support for your Ext2 partition, follow these steps :

1. Download and install NTFS-3G Package which includes FUSE libraries.
   AFAIK NTFS-3G has been renamed into Tuxera NTFS and is a shareware now. But any way you can download the old GPL version here. it works in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.
   .
2. Download fuse-ext2 package
   .
3. Use Disk Utility to un-mount current Ext2 filesystems if there are any
   .
4. Remove any old filesystem drivers for ext2 from /System/Library/FileSystems (it was ext2.fs for me)
   .
5. Install fuse-ext2 package
   .
6. Since write support is experimental, it is not enabled by default. To enable it, open /System/Library/Filesystems/fuse-ext2.fs/fuse-ext2.util for edit while having super user privileges.
   .
7. Edit the OPTIONS variable at line 207 from
   OPTIONS="auto_xattr,defer_permissions"
   to
   OPTIONS="auto_xattr,defer_permissions,rw+"
   .
8. Open Disk Utility and choose Mount for your filesystem and have fun !

Tags: Apple, Linux, MacOSX, Open Source

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 23rd, 2010 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Believe Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.