Adding NTFS Support to your Linux Distribution

[imported_Affix]

Many Linux Distrobutions Ship with no NTFS Support. NTFS Is the windows File System.

Why Would I want NTFS Support?
Well you may have some data on your Windows HDD such as music and Photos you wanty to have on both systems. By Adding NTFS Support you save on disk space by Keeping only 1 copy of your files and using ntfs-3g on your Linux / Mac Desktop to read and write to your NTFS Drive.

How do I install It?
To install it you First of all need to Download the NTFS-3G Source Files. You can do so with the WGET Command.

[root@yourDesktop ~]# wget http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ntfs-3g-2009.2.1.tgz
--2009-03-02 14:00:29--  http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ntfs-3g-2009.2.1.tgz
Resolving www.ntfs-3g.org... 91.189.209.156
Connecting to www.ntfs-3g.org|91.189.209.156|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 652082 (637K) [application/x-tar]
Saving to: `ntfs-3g-2009.2.1.tgz'

100%[======================================>] 652,082     1.07M/s   in 0.6s

2009-03-02 14:00:30 (1.07 MB/s) - `ntfs-3g-2009.2.1.tgz' saved [652082/652082]

Now you Must Extract your source using the tar command.

[root@yourDesktop ~]# tar -zxvf ntfs-3g-2009.2.1.tgz
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/AUTHORS
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/COPYING
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/COPYING.LIB
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/CREDITS
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/ChangeLog
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/Makefile.am
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/NEWS
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/README
ntfs-3g-2009.2.1/autogen.sh
...more...

Now change Direcotry to the ntfs-3g-2009.2.1 Directory

[root@yourDesktop ~]# cd ntfs-3g-2009.2.1

Once you have done that you must configure the Source for install using ./configure

[root@yourDesktop ~]# ./configure

You will get an output like this :

checking for windows.h... no
checking syslog.h usability... yes
checking syslog.h presence... yes
checking for syslog.h... yes
checking for stdbool.h that conforms to C99... yes
checking for _Bool... yes
checking whether byte ordering is

If you see this at the end

You can type now 'make' to build ntfs-3g.

You can do the make command like so

[root@yourDesktop ~]# make

This will compile your NTFS Driver

Once the make command is complete you may now type 'make install'

[root@yourDesktop ~]# make install

This will then configure ntfs-3g onto your system.

Finally you can mount your NTFS Drive (e.g /dev/sda1) using the following command

[root@yourDesktop ~]# mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /mount/ntfs

Note the '/mount/ntfs' Directory must already exist to create the directory do

[root@yourDesktop ~]# mkdir /mount/ntfs

[Jordan]

Is netfs-3g stable now? You could also use a FAT partition. Excellent tutorial!

[imported_Affix]

Yeah NTFS-3G Provides stable write support with no problems

We have it on Fedora 10 by default now