Will Dyson wrote in to inform us about the brand new version of his BFS filesystem driver for the Linux 2.4.x kernel. His code is based on Makoto Kato’s original work, while there is another, older, version of a BFS driver for kernels 2.2.x already available. These drivers are all read-only and they do not (yet) expose the BeFS’s advanced features like attributes and indexes.
Read BeOS BFS Volumes Under Linux
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I’m not a filesystem guru, but it seems like Reiser4’s pluggable design
would make it easy to add BFS style attributes. Does someone more knowledgeable have some light to shed? I’d love if nautilus et al. stored their metadata in the filesystem through attributes.
I’m sitting here on an XFS box that already does attributes. Its all just a matter of hacking Nautilus to use them.
I have a 40 gig hard drive that is BFS formatted and contains just a few gigs of MP3s, plus a couple of backup files. There is no OS installed. I was using Scott Hacker’s RipEnc for BeOS with the Gogo encoder to quickly and painlessly rip my CDs to mp3 and fill in all of the attributes.
I recently installed Linux Mandrake 8.1 on my primary 15 gig drive as part of a migration to Linux. I’ve got the Mandrake install formatted as XFS because I hate waiting for fsck to do its job in case of “accidents.” Since Linux only has partial and read-only capability with BFS, I’d consider wiping my 40 gig drive and reformatting it as XFS to take advantage of XFS’s attribute system for mp3 ripping.
However, are there any tools for Linux & XFS that will let me do what I was doing in BeOS? I’d like to use something that gives me the same results as Scott’s RipEnc does…all the mp3’s stored in a nice folder heirarchy complete with ID3 tags and extended attributes filled in. Something similar to MP3 Flashlight would prove invaluable, too…a dedicated query tool where you type what you’d like to [play/make a playlist of] into one of the attribute query fields.
>However, are there any tools for Linux & XFS that will let me do what I was doing in BeOS?
No. XFS has *all* the goodies/features that BeOS BFS has (except the Live Queries, but that is a Linux kernel problem, not XFS’. Live Queries are supported well under XFS’ original OS, the SGI IRIX), but there is no software under Linux to utilize these features. And that is the sad part of it. You got an a$$-kicking filesystem like XFS is, and you can’t use its advanced capabilities the way they can be used under BeOS with the use of Tracker etc. because according to one of our interviewees here at OSNews “using such attributed files (except maybe mp3 files) they will break uniformity/compatibility with other partitions, distros, programs etc etc”. This is what I call a legacy OS btw. An OS that afraids to *use* such advancements, even if these advancements *are already there*!
Arrghhh…how disheartening! So BeOS still reigns supreme for my media storage/playback needs, Linux takes care of most everything else and Windows lets me play Half Life.
So if I wanted to put the 40 gig BFS HD onto an older system in a closet, but still wanted to rip & store mp3’s on it, I guess the best solution would be to maintain a small BeOS partition on my desktop computer (complete with RipEnc)and then use BeServed to xfer the files over (thereby maintaining the attributes). From there, run Be in My Stereo on the closet computer and play it locally with XMMS.
I find the Linux users like to claim to have all the features of other OSes in thier favorite, but OS feature that are not supported by software are worthless. Many features of UNIX/Linux are decades old and no-one wants to change them because they always were done that way, not because it is the best way. Unix had a number of choices forced on it by the hardware limitations at the time it was developed, but now when those limits don’t exist Linux still does things the same old way to stay compatible. Yes, Linux is a legacy OS!