Marek Szyprowski has released a very early alpha version of a NTFS filesystem driver for MorphOS.
NTFS driver for MorphOS
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Last I heard, MorphOS was in some kind of custody battle…
When, oh, when is read/write NTFS going to be the defacto standard on non-MS OS’s… About the time Shorthorn comes out with something new to start all over?
So far my BitDefender Linux CD is the only CD bootable or installed I could find that has this feature built in.
Anyone know of others that do this native?
MrX
Any of them with a newer linux kernel can do it. I know for sure SuSe’s SLES9 seems to do it pretty well. No NTFS partitions here, so no big deal. NTFS isn’t a something people are dying for, it’s not like with floppys or usb drives where 99% of the time you are dealing with FAT. If you are dualbooting and need access to data or have important data you may want to recover later, then make a FAT partition to store it. For your system volume, make it NTFS if you have to and then there are options to get in there and do what you need to do, if you have to, but you may not be able to use your favorite distro to do it.
> Last I heard, MorphOS was in some kind of custody battle…
And it hasn’t changed. Every interested reader should take my advise and avoid MorphOS on it’s best. Most of you people who read this article and get interested in the good old Amiga again. Do yourself and your health something good and use something else (Linux, MacOS, …). MorphOS might be an interesting project but the entire community of Amigans are a bunch of creazy weirdos. Once you visit http://www.ann.lu and start diving in some of the comments written by people you see how much hate and bullshit they throw to each other. It’s definately not a community you would feel happy about. Seeing that the Amiga somehow continues is nice, but not the way they are doing it. It took them 1.5 years to release just one tiny update of the OS and it had just small updates that are known to not work properly which you can read up on http://www.morphzone.org/ a lot of copyright violating stuff involved and getting help from them is also a fact of the more you crawl ass the more help you get since the entire community is build up of people with huge egos and eliteist attitude. So take my advise, you feel better if you contribute to an open source community like Linux, where you have the possibility to deal with serious people following a serious vision in getting stuff done the correct way, something that gives you something back for the long term.
On an OS for PPC…. I mean, I see the use for it for dual booters, since I’ve yet to find a good ext3/windows solution, on x86…but how often would you really want this on a ppc box?
Hello ?
http://home.elka.pw.edu.pl/~mszyprow/programy/ext2filesystem/
http://home.elka.pw.edu.pl/~mszyprow/programy/ntfilesystem/
http://home.elka.pw.edu.pl/~mszyprow/programy/sgixfilesystem/
http://home.elka.pw.edu.pl/~mszyprow/programy/asfs/
A single guy writing 4 DAMN COMPLEX filesystem drivers for a propitary OS in that short time ? The same counterparts for Linux would have taken years by a group of people getting realized. This leads to one conclusion… guess…
A single guy writing 4 DAMN COMPLEX filesystem drivers for a propitary OS in that short time ? The same counterparts for Linux would have taken years by a group of people getting realized. This leads to one conclusion… guess…
It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing. Also, there’s a massive difference in time needed to write a simple versus a production-quality fs driver.
What good does this do for MorphOS?.
It would be cool if the developers of this OS could use their time to port it to the Mac Mini.
It would be happy to pay good $ to have a dual boot Mac OSX/ MorphOS Mini.
Sorry if this has been beat to death.
> It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing.
Yes, if you still believe to Santa Claus. I tend to say that without all the open source stuff available and code that you can peek in or simply rip off, these drivers wouldn’t have been possible.
I seriously doubt that even this guy know what he is doing, not even former commodore engineers had OFS or FFS under full control, not even SFS under MorphOS works perfectly (and it’s written by someone over years who seriously doesn’t lack skills).
After some feedback with key XFS filesystem engineers from SGI, even those doubt that this guy would be able to handle the xfs filesystem alone without having peeked into the original code (which in his readme shows proof that this most likely has happened).
If there would be really so much geniouses on Amiga then by now it would be the successing operating system with an uncountable amount of followers – maybe more than we have on Linux.
When, oh, when is read/write NTFS going to be the defacto standard on non-MS OS’s… About the time Shorthorn comes out with something new to start all over?
When it’s not patent encumbered or legally risky to include?
Seriously. That’s the main reason it’s not standard. NTFS IS patented by Microsoft. Anybody without a patent license from Microsoft is oepning themselves up to legal action if they ship an NTFS driver with their code in a country that honors software patents.
Seriously. That’s the main reason it’s not standard. NTFS IS patented by Microsoft. Anybody without a patent license from Microsoft is oepning themselves up to legal action if they ship an NTFS driver with their code in a country that honors software patents.
What part is patented? We shipped a NTFS driver with BeOS (written by yours truly) for years without any trouble, except for the part where we went out of business…
Didn’t have anything to do with legal trouble though.
Yes, if you still believe to Santa Claus. I tend to say that without all the open source stuff available and code that you can peek in or simply rip off, these drivers wouldn’t have been possible.
So? I guess if all you were implying in the original message was this developer looked at some existing code, then you’re probably right. I certainly read your implication as he had totally ripped off an existing driver and thus deserved to be crucified.
I seriously doubt that even this guy know what he is doing, not even former commodore engineers had OFS or FFS under full control, not even SFS under MorphOS works perfectly (and it’s written by someone over years who seriously doesn’t lack skills).
Don’t assume that there aren’t great developers in the wings. Also, as I said before these drivers may be very rough, which is far far easier than production quality.
After some feedback with key XFS filesystem engineers from SGI, even those doubt that this guy would be able to handle the xfs filesystem alone without having peeked into the original code (which in his readme shows proof that this most likely has happened).
Again, there’s no crime looking at a open source driver to see how things are done. In many cases the source *is* the documentation for something like a file system. Copying large chunks of it verbatim is a problem though.
Give this guy a break. As a former fs developer I went through pretty much the same process and I hope he has the best of luck.
> BeOS may be dead, but I’m glad Amiga isn’t.
Wake up for your sleepy beautys dream. We are having 2005 now. Other architectures dominate this planet with other demands. There is nothing serious you can get done with Amiga, there doesn’t even exist a serious browser. Even Lynx or Links are miles ahead of what you have. Not speaking about doing serious work like UML, Wordprocessing and other shit. You don’t even have a handful of serious games to entertain people. Looking at what’s native released reminds me looking at stuff from early 90’s.
Why is there no NTFS Driver for Mac OS X? Even the obscure Morph OS has it now.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfsosx/
there are a few floating around but most tend to be ‘read-only’ from my expirience
Well, well, Mr. anonymized anonymous. You are so brave in throwing mud at MorphOS, but obviously not brave enough to
sign all those nonsences with own name. And then you request us, the readers, to take your advise? Visiting http:///www.ann.lu is definitely not a good idea, the site is populated by lot of parasites similar to you Mr. anonymous. Their interest is narrowed to throwing mud and writing insults. MorphOS Team released three updates (1.4, 1.4.2, 1.4.4) after the first public version 1.3, the next 1.4.5 update is expected to be out in a few weeks. Requesting an example of “violated copyrights” from you is too much, isn’t it? If you have some issues about getting help with MorphOS, why not talk about? But well who I am talking with now? With anonymizer.com… And I’m curious if the Linux community needs persons like you, contributing to Linux by insulting other operating systems and its communities. Contributing to an OS is doing something positive for it, not something negative to others.
OSX can read NTFS without any additional driver.. it’d be pretty silly if a third-party driver was also read-only.
I second Paul Gallant, get AmigaOS/MorphOS on MacMini and I’m sold. The MacMini is the cheapest PPC hardware you can get without building it yourself, this would put Amiga software in the hands of a great deal many more people than currently. Find a market people, find a market.
I think you should know that there is a linux NTFS read and write capability. It’s called Captive-NTFS. It actually just uses some kind of wrapper to access microsoft’s own .dll for ntfs. I have been using it for a year now without any data corruption.
What’s the problem with WRITING to an NTFS partition? I mean, reading has been around for YEARS, but writing is just non-existent. Some claim to have ‘experimental’ writing support (which doesn’t work, as in FreeBSD for example), does it really take so much more voodoo to do it?
What part is patented? We shipped a NTFS driver with BeOS (written by yours truly) for years without any trouble, except for the part where we went out of business…
Oh, here’s a few dozen patents related to NTFS at least:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u…
…does it really take so much more voodoo to do it?
Yes, especially since it’s an undocumented format that has changed over the years. NTFS is not just a single type of filesystem, but rather comprises several subtly different on disk formats as far as capabilities.
Give this guy a break. As a former fs developer I went through pretty much the same process and I hope he has the best of luck.
I think the point was that in order for him to put out these drivers so fast he was using oss to help. There is nothing wrong with that and he is probably a very skilled programmer, it’s just that the original post was implying that he was some sort of super programmer.
> What part is patented? We shipped a NTFS driver
> with BeOS (written by yours truly) for years
> without any trouble, except for the part where
> we went out of business…
Just to clarify:
Did you have full read/write support for all versions?
Was the driver reverse engineered or did you have access to MS’s system documentation?
Did BeOS purchase a license from Microsoft to distribute the NTFS driver? (not saying they did, but it is possible)
If you had full write support achieved through reverse engineering, the Linux NTFS driver people probably want to talk to you ASAP. (It is my understanding that NTFS write does not work because all the database updates necessary in NTFS are not fully understood.)
> What part is patented? We shipped a NTFS driver with BeOS (written by yours truly) for years without any trouble, except for the part where we went out of business…
Oh, here’s a few dozen patents related to NTFS at least:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITO…
Looked through those, nothing particularly worrysome. Writing an implementation to parse an elaborate data structure (the filesystem itself) wouldn’t get anywhere close to those patents. Also, a bunch of those were filed right around or after I worked on the driver for Be anyway.
Just to clarify:
Did you have full read/write support for all versions?
Nope. I hacked a bit on it myself, but it was definitely not ready for release.
Was the driver reverse engineered or did you have access to MS’s system documentation?
The former. I think we asked for the docs but the cost exceeded the value of the company.
Did BeOS purchase a license from Microsoft to distribute the NTFS driver? (not saying they did, but it is possible)
nope.
If you had full write support achieved through reverse engineering, the Linux NTFS driver people probably want to talk to you ASAP. (It is my understanding that NTFS write does not work because all the database updates necessary in NTFS are not fully understood.)
Right. Basically it’s 100x easier to write a read/only implementation of a filesystem. Worst case you dont handle something write and a file looks wrong, directory lookups are wonky, etc. Lots of little pieces of data here and there may be totally opaque and appear to never change, and can generally be ignored with no real negative harm.
For read/write it’s a whole different story. If you get something wrong best case you usually trash their volume. All of those opaque unknown values mean something, you just dont have any idea what. Writing unknown data structures is a really dangerous thing.
Real production file system development is extremely difficult and time consuming. It’s one of those pieces of software where *any* failure or corruption is totally unacceptable.
Best of luck to you and ignore the naysayers, they’re not worth it.
The one time I considered a MorphOS PC. I went to the message borads to ask a few questions. Mind you these were not “troll” questions. More like. How hard to setup and get working. What it will and won’t do…. The end result from the rather insluting comments made by the MorphOS users was enough to turn me off to MorphOS. I wish them the best of luck, but I would never buy one.
Setup is quite easy, just boot off the MOS-CD, follow the instructions to prepare a HD with a supported filesystem (with write access ;-)) and double click the install icon.
Your 2nd question is not that easy to answer, it does a lot and it doesn’t a lot.
Biggest suffice is proper webbrowsing. Well, if you’re interested to get answers visit the right web pages (best one of course is http://www.morphzone.org (currently down due to server move, should be up and running again tomorrow)).
It’s a system which is still more for enthusiasts. To be honest it’s not fullfilling all everyday needs – most MOS users have another additional systems.
The “war” between MOS and AOS is annoying, but became a bit cooler recently IMO.
While I thank your for your reponce. My point is that when I went to the MorphOS community for answers. I got some of meanist, nastist respones I have ever seen. I wouldn’t by MorphOS now if it was the last OS on Earth.
Someone Else tried this a few years back.
He didnt succeed.
Yeah it’s a bit of a problem that most non-MS OS’s dont support read/write to NTFS. Therefore i use a FAT32 partition for storing my music and documents so i can share them between my OS’s. But i know there are NTFS drivers for Linux that support read/write. http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/status.html this is one of them, but sadly it’s only limited write support. http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/ this is also a sollution for write support.
http://bitsofnews.com & http://tech.bitsofnews.com
My original point is not a troll for MorphOS in fact I hope it and all non-MS software does well..Really!
My question was..when will the captive driver or some similar one be the standard on Linux and other OS’s. I know alot of ‘nix OS’s read hunky-dory, but I would like it to write to NTFS out of the box. I am suprised more end-users don’t ask for the same. Even on my BitDefender Bootable Linux CD it is a several step process to get it to write to NTFS. The CD also comes with a “you break it, you bought it” warning about the driver. A bit scary when used to delete known spyware and viri that is too buried for even a “safe mode” removal.
Any links to known writable OS’s appreciated..
MrX
My question was..when will the captive driver or some similar one be the standard on Linux and other OS’s.
Likely never. Since the captive one requires a .DLL from Windows, which is of questionable legality as far as redistribution and so forth.
I can’t see Linus ever accepting it into the kernel proper either.
Patents are mainly to blame, and in this case licensing questions…
Patents are mainly to blame, and in this case licensing questions…
Always with the patents. I think it’s a lot simpler than folks are making it out to be.
1) No one is going to pay microsoft for the ntfs specs, if they would even release it. It’s very expensive and not in MS’s best interest to sell them.
2) Reverse engineering enough details to write a fully stable R/W NTFS is extremely complicated, and no one has been able to fully do it. Much of the groundword was done years ago, but the last few parts of ntfs are still pretty opaque. Also, it’s a moving target, it has been updated a few times over the years.
Hello DFergATL,
>The one time I considered a MorphOS PC. I went to
>the message borads to ask a few questions.
>Mind you these were not “troll” questions.
>More like. How hard to setup and get working.
>What it will and won’t do….
>The end result from the rather insluting comments
>made by the MorphOS users was enough to turn me off
>to MorphOS.
>I wish them the best of luck, but I would never buy one.
Strange.
I never experienced the same…
However I belong to the italian MorphOS community and is quite calm here. Also the fact we know each other now, helped in avoiding flamers and bad people.
I started to message in forums with MOS users as Amigan only, and even if I know nothing of MorphOS, I meet a lot of good people, experienced and armed with patience; expecially Miky’060 a vendor who live 40 KMs from me (I am in Naples). Sure he is a guru in MorphOS and helped me a lot in increasing my knowledge in MorphOS and Pegasos and even he made me change my mind.
So I am about to buy a peggy from him 😉 right in these days.
Also I know from a very long time as amigan the Prof.Morbius, a very kind person who was one of the first in buying a Pegasos II here. And also he helped me in choosing this system.
Well. I think you were unfortunate and meet very bad people. It is a consquence of the long hatred by other systems regarding us amigans, which made us very rude versus “foreigners” coming from other OSes, and recently the quarrel between MOS and AOS rised up, flamed by trolls and OS-hooligans. The Amiga related forums unfortunately have plenty of them.
(The reason is that resisting in all these years, blamed by other OS users, and without any reference of a strong firm like Commodore, which could help in keeping Amiga alive, makes remaining Amigans very very ugly and rude.).
I think MOS users assumed you were a troll from other camp (AOS) and reacted in consequence.
Sorry for that. We have no excuses.
Bye,
Raffaele