Writing to NTFS

I heard somewhere that linux can't write to Windows XP partitions on your drive.
Is this true or not?
and Using Samba shares can i copy a document to my friends computer over the lan if he's running XP and i'm Slackware?

Samba uses SMB protocol (which Windows uses natively) so that works all right, no problem. You can copy a document to your friends computer over the lan if he's running XP and you're running Slackware, if you just have Samba installed and are granted access (like username/password if needed) to the shares.

The claim that Linux "can't write to XP partitions" (meaning: it can't write to ntfs partitions) is basically false, but not completely:

The ordinary, native ntfs "driver" of Linux can be used to access an ntfs partition, but read-only. It cannot write to ntfs. However there is software that can write to ntfs partitions too, one of them being Captive. But they're not perfect - their writing is unsure, it might or might not work (it's like 50% chance of succeeding in writing/deleting data), and could cause problems like data loss or corruption. And last time I checked, the other one of the two I tested, didn't work on 64-bit systems. So to cut it short: Linux can read and write to an ntfs partition, reading works quite perfectly, but writing is unsure and at the time does not work all right.

You might want to read more about this, so google for "linux ntfs write support", or visit Captive's website.

Google for ntfs-3g it's supposed to be pretty good.

Hi,

I use slackware 11 & install the huge26.s
just after i install the rest of the kernel ( header / source / generic / ... ) & compile ... reboot
all is ok

but as i can read an ntfs partition i can't write on it.

I don't understand because when i compile it ... i choose to write on the ntfs partion in the option of make xconfig

does one of you've got an idea ?

I have many x86_64 systems and i686, that read & write to a shared NTFS data partition, I installed ntfs-3g and dependencies from Debian repositories for my Debian Etch because their ntfs-3g package is version 1.0 or above. The rest of my systems I installed ntfs-3g and Fuse from source because their version is below 1.0 which is considered unstable, except for Fedora's package, but it has issues with SELinux, so I installed from source on it also. There is a link to the Fuse package on the ntfs-3g site highlighted in blue in the install instructions which has to be installed first. Instructions for installing them are pretty easy, if your kernel is version 2.6.20 or above, you still need to go through the steps to install fuse from source, but the ./configure step will tell you it will not compile the kernel module because the kernel module has the proper one. For kernels below 2.6.20, you have to add something to the configure step as such:

./configure --enable-kernel-module

For Mandriva and PC Linux, you need to remove the "fuse.ko.gz" module in /lib/modules/uname -r/kernel/fs/fuse directory and back it up by putting it in your /home or separate data partition. Because the supplied "fuse.ko.gz" will over ride the module you build with the proper version of fuse from source. And you need to install kernel source or headers for the current running kernel to compile them.

Here is the link to ntfs-3g http://www.ntfs-3g.org/