Sunday, April 5, 2009

NTFS-3G 2009.4.4

What's new:
  • All in the official release notes.

  • Simplified install procedure: NTFS-3G now installs MacFUSE (2.0.2/2.0.3) with it, so that users don't have to download two different packages to get read/write NTFS support working.

  • New preference pane version, 0.9.8: The user can now choose to always mount (recover) uncleanly unmounted volumes without user confirmation. (Some minor bugfixes also included.)

  • The NTFS-3G system preferences are now retained between installs, and limited support for automatically repairing damaged NTFS-3G settings has been added.

  • When asking for confirmation before mounting a volume with an unclean log file or a hibernated volume, the dialog informing the user that the mount succeeded has been removed.

  • The 'stable' and 'ublio' labels are dropped. We now have a 'standard' build, and a 'legacy' build in case anyone is still interested in the limited feature set of the old 'stable' build. The 'legacy' build will probably be removed in the future, unless anyone has a good reason that it should be kept maintained.
Download:System requirements:
  • Mac OS X 10.4/10.5, running on an Intel or PowerPC computer.
The package has been tested with Mac OS X 10.4.11/Intel and Mac OS X 10.5.6/Intel.
NTFS-3G includes and depends on MacFUSE.

Information on how to install and use NTFS-3G for Mac OS X can be found in the User Guide.
If you are having problems with NTFS-3G, write a forum post about it in the NTFS-3G Forum (or post a question as a blog comment if you're just unsure of how things work).

Packaging, patching, Mac OS X-related development and testing is done in the context of my development efforts with the Catacombae projects.

Known issues:
  • After installing ntfs-3g, all NTFS drives will disappear from the "Startup Disk" preference pane. Disabling or uninstalling ntfs-3g brings them back. It seems that this issue can't be solved, but only worked around since the Startup Disk preference pane doesn't recognize file system drivers that are not provided by Apple.
    Possible workarounds:
    • 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)
Sources:
ntfs-3g 2009.4.4 (patched)
ntfsprogs 1.13.1
NTFS-3G prefpane 0.9.8
fuse_wait.c
ntfs-3g_daemon.c
ntfs-3g_confirm_mount.c