Is there any Linux distribution that has full NTFS support?
 

Hello there,
I was using ubuntu 10.10 earlier and found that it does allow user to modify the file permissions for the files inside NTFS partition.
I have few files on NTFS partition and I cannot afford to move them, but I need to change the file permissions of those regularly.
Can anyone tell me, if there is any other linux distribution that has full support to NTFS file systems and will not create any such problem?
Thanks in advance.

Most distributions support NTFS-3g in addition to the basic NTFS driver. The only significant thing you can't do with NTFS using the NTFS-3g driver is run fsck (chkdisk).

Keep in mind that NTFS is a Microsoft proprietary (closed source) patented / copyrighted technology. That means that everything created on Linux in regards to the filesystem must be painstakingly reverse-engineered. Unless you absolutely must use NTFS, you are much better off using an open source filesystem.

To add to that. Most distro's do not mount filesystems in read write (ntfs-3g). You usually have to tell the distro to do that and might require admin or other privileges to the user.

all recent distros, if not then almost all recent distros .


but the normal user will have only read only as default

NTFS format DOSE NOT support file permissions, never did .

there is an illusion of "file permissions" but it is just that an illusion

Strongly depends on the NTFS version. NTFS 3 4 and 5 are as good as fully supported by ntfs-3g. NTFS 6 (vista/win7) is partially supported.

Here are some tutorials on accessing Windows partitions on Ubuntu:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/mountwindows
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mo...dowsPartitions
http://www.7tutorials.com/accessing-...untu-windows-7
As others have said, these days pretty much all distros can read and write to Windows NTFS partitions.
All of the currently supported recent versions of Ubuntu have full NTFS read and write capability right out of the box.
If you use have trouble with file permissions on Windows partitions try using sudo in the terminal to modify the files and or the file permissions.

Load TinyCoreLinux (if you like manual works..)

Thank you all for your views.
Seems a tough issue with NTFS.
So, how do I use this ntfs-3g?
Will it help me in modifying permissions on NTFS ?

No. NTFS doesn't support Unix-style permissions.

Hello,
you cannot change filepermissions of an NTFS-system with Linux. More general you cannot change filepermissions of another Operatingsystem or even another Linux-installation on the same computer. The only exception is if you have (between Linux-installations) same user same ID.
The same is true for Windows, you cannot change the permissions for one system on another (for example on an external harddrive).

The problem is, that (in general) one operatingsystem does not know about the users on the other system.

But note that it is possible to handle root's permissions between different Linux-systems because root has always ID=0.

Markus

Here are a couple of articles with more information:

Howto: Permissions and ownership on FAT and NTFS filesystems - Linuxquestions.org

Ownership and Permissions - Tuxera.com

edit The Tuxera article seems to suggest that future versions of the driver may support editing NTFS ACLs. That is, if I understand what I'm reading there. At any rate, I've never had success using chmod on NTFS volumes.