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It must be limited writing or very unsafe writing, AFAIK.
But then, the port is still completely new.

Anyway, this is one more notch for Syllable

Linux's NTFS driver supports writing to files since 2.6.15 (which was released on 3 January), it's only missing creation/deletion of files and mmap-based writes


Now, that's the kernel driver. The Linux NTFS project has a userspace library which may have already write support. They also have a FUSE filesystem NTFS program that allwos creating files and that probably uses libntfs

This is huge! Now i don't have to download stuff and burn it to cd's to transport files from my XP install to my syllable partion! I cant wait to try this, this is pretty sweet.

"This is huge! Now i don't have to download stuff and burn it to cd's to transport files from my XP install to my syllable partion! I cant wait to try this, this is pretty sweet."

Too bad (most of) everyone else in the linux [distro] game doesn't think so, because writing to NTFS doesn't "just work".

A few days ago Xandros got bashed for not beeing a true (free) linux distro, and yet they realised the importance of this, as other small things. Cheers to them.

I hope other distros follow these steps, soon(tm)...

I completely understand why most Linux distributions don't include NTFS write support yet. Right now, they have the option of the native kernel NTFS write support which can be generously described as "preliminary," or the ntfsmount project which is built on top of FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace), a feature that was merged into the mainline kernel at 2.6.14. I'll acknowledge the existence of captive-ntfs, but I wouldn't recommend it to my worst enemies.

There are reasonably simple HOWTOs for several distributions on setting up ntfsmount using FUSE. Here's one for FC5:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=112316

If it's that simple, then why don't they install it by default? We're dealing with filesystems here, and more importantly, we're dealing with Windows filesystems, and even more importantly, we're dealing with them using an experimental reverse-engineered driver. If I were a release manager for a Linux distribution, I wouldn't include a feature by default that might corrupt users' Windows installations after the first time they boot Linux (automount the NTFS filesystem). It seems that most of the actual release managers agree.

Xandros is including NTFS write support using commercial software from Paragon. They charge $20 for a kernel module and a mount/umount extension. The full version which includes a mkfs extension, a fsck extension, and logical volume and RAID support runs $150. They offer a free demo in the form of a LiveCD. No, you can't just copy the kernel module and mount binaries from the LiveCD, it's all locked down, I checked

This is pure kernel-mode driver. Linux doesn't support NTFS-write properly in kernel mode, so I didn't bother with file write code.