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
Posted in Believe Me | No Comments »

Source-Forge, The huge open-source software repository recently has banned some countries from downloading free softwares from their servers. However there’s a quick trick which you can download the files directly from source-forge mirrors, bypassing that ip check.

You can click on the file you wanna download inside the “Files” section and take care when the following page appeared press ESC key to stop loading the page.

Now right-click on “direct link” and Copy the link address and Paste it into your address bar. It should look like this :

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openproj/OpenProj%20Binaries/1.4/openproj_1.4-2.deb?use_mirror=surfnet

The last part, marked as red, shows the mirror you’re going to download from. Turn the URL into something like this :

http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/openproj/OpenProj%20Binaries/1.4/openproj_1.4-2.deb

And it will download the file directly. In addition, some mirrors are not accessible because of routing path problems. I usually use “kent” as my mirror.

Tags: Open Source
Posted in Believe Me | 5 Comments »