Tuesday, July 15, 2008

NTFS-3G 1.2712

Information on what's new in this version of NTFS-3G can be found at the NTFS-3G release page.

There are no changes in the Mac OS X specific components for this release. See earlier blog posts for previous changes.

Download NTFS-3G 1.2712 [stable]
Download NTFS-3G 1.2712 [ublio] (patched for improved performance)

Packaging, patching, some OS X-related development and testing has been done by Catacombae Software (i.e. myself).

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4/10.5, a PowerPC or Intel computer, MacFUSE 1.3 or later installed (1.7 recommended).
This package has been tested with OS X 10.4.11/Intel and OS X 10.5.4/Intel.

Known issues:
  • Files with filenames created in Windows containing international characters with accents, umlauts and similar dots and lines, or filenames with korean characters might seem unreadable in the Finder. This is because Finder apparently expects all filenames to appear in unicode decomposed form, while NTFS allows both composed and decomposed form filenames. This issue is hard to solve in a pretty way, but you should still be able to access these files when using the Terminal. For me, copying the affected files to a HFS+ drive using the command "cp" worked fine.

  • After installing ntfs-3g, all NTFS drives will disappear from the "Startup Disk" preference pane. Disabling or uninstalling ntfs-3g brings them back. I don't have a solution for this, but you can still choose your startup drive by:
    • Holding down the Option key during boot (or Alt for non-Apple keyboards).

    • Intel users only: Install the rEFIt boot manager for better control of the boot process.

    • Using the command line utility bless (see man bless for more information)
    If you have any information on a pretty way of solving this issue, I'd love to hear about it.

Sources:
ntfs-3g 1.2712 (patched)
ntfsprogs 1.13.1
fuse_wait.c
ntfs-3g_daemon.c