I am considering switching from Mandrake to Fedora. Does anyone know if Fedora Core 4 has NTFS read support? I could care less about writing, just reading so I can access things and copy 'em over to my 'nix partition (such as music, documents, or pictures).

Right now, I have a dual boot with XP Home (yikes, I know), and Linux Mandrake 10.2 RC 1.

If it's not available, how difficult is it to deal with the ntfs rpms?

Thanks in advance,

Samantha

NFTS read support has been around in the kernel for some time now, in mandrake you just need to load the particular module
and since there is no Fedora Core 4 (yet), then no FC4 doesn't (yet) have support for ntfs

Huh, I thought that I saw FC 4 Test was released. Weird.

Yeah, I can access it fine in Mandrake, I just wasn't sure if I could access it in Fedora Core 3 or the new Core 4 which may be out soon.

So, can you read the NTFS partition under FC 3? Or do you have to do something special?

Thanks for the 411.

Samantha

Yes, there has been a Fedora Test 4 out now for a couple of weeks at least. Fedora's already bleeding edge, though, so unless you really want to spend inordinate amounts of time getting basic functionality, I would stick to 3. Core 4 is coming out around summer, I think. As far as NTFS support, it's not automatic, but it's easy. No kernel recompiles are necessary. In fact, you can use RPMs (including for Fedora Core 4):

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html

Im running FC4 Test1 right now. Yes it has read support, it also has limited (and somewhat imperfect) write support as does FC3.

FC3 reads NTFS great once you enable it. you can get rpms at http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/instructions.html so that you don't have to recompile the kernel. Im actually using FC3 to process a large amount of data stored on hard drives which were formatted in NTFS. I am having no problems reading the files from NTFS on the 250 GB maxtor one touch drives through firewire.

once the module is in place make a directory to mount it to then "mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/hda2 /mnt/ntfs_drive"

Yes sure, you can enable NTFS on FC3.
Either you gotta recompile/compile a vanilla kernel with enabling ntfs or you can use the ntfs kernel modules from http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/rpm/index.html.

I'm running FC3 right now, and installed the NTFS kernel module. It works great. One thing to remember is that if you update the kernel, the module will no longer work. Fortunately, it only takes a few minutes to reinstall it.

Here's the line from my /etc/fstab file that I use to automatically mount the drive when I boot up:

For folks who are newer to Linux, the "/dev/hda1" may be a different drive depending on your setup. You need to use the "umask=0222" instead of "defaults", because a NTFS or FAT partition won't handle user permissions the same way. For my FAT partition (so that Windows and Linux can both equally access a partition), I have "umask=000" listed.

You don't have to put your mount point where I have it listed. Any place that you will find it works.

Good luck.

Thank you so much for the responses. I will take all of this into consideration.

Samantha

This page tells you how...

http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...ion_notes.html

Thank you for posting that link, Bejus. That's exactly what I needed to see! (And strange RedHat photo on the index page, if I might add...)