Hi folks, yes, there is already allot of information out on the WWW about FUSE but can someone explain in simple language why I would want to use it.
I've been using for many years and am not a newbie, but I can't work out where I would use FUSE and importantly why I would want to. By default my distro loads the modules and something is using it.
PS: gnome desktop, Debian 4, kernel 2.6.25.

Do you have any NTFS partitions ???.
Try looking at the project homepage - the very first thing they tell you is what it is; and it's features. And if you have a look at the list of other projects using it, you might be surprised.

Yes, I've looked at the project home page. I'm still not understanding the point considering I've mounted ntfs etal partitions before I ever heard of FUSE. Isn't this capability in the kernel? - I normally compile it in. I understand that it allows a user to mount a filesystem without having root privileges also to provide consistency for mounting regardless of using gnome/kde etc. If you configure your fstab correctly then you can do that anyway. Is there any examples you can give where you would use this effectively? The project home page and their wiki really doesn't sell the concept - this is the information I'm after. I understand from their wiki that it is supposed to create consistency for a user to mount file systems. Either the system is very transparent or I'm not using it at all, I'd like to know which and how I can use it beneficially in my day to day computing.

I can see allot of uninstalled packages relating to fuse and I guess I'm trying to work out if I need them or they will make my computing life easier. I can pretty much mount anything I need to using gnome, kde, xfce, shell etc. If anyone uses this functionality it would be great to have a plain english simple description so us not familiar with it can have a understanding and decide if we want to use it or not and also how. My debian repos don't have any packages called gfuse-manager so I can't even try it without spending time downloading and compiling packages.

FUSE is a combination of kernel and userspace code that lets you do out of the ordinary things and treat them as a mounted filesystem. Things like sshfs which lets you mount a directory from another machine that you only have ssh access to, browse a database, mount ntfs read/write without having to worry about corrupting writes, store files in gmail, automatic revision control, multiple server distributed filesystems, ... and while doing any of these you can use your normal file utility commands. FUSE rocks and the coolest thing about it is you can write your own filesystem with it in quite a few different languages and its pretty amazing some of the filesystems that people have already put together.

Getting new code into the kernel mainline is damn near impossible - more and more is being pushed back to userspace. Even adding features to existing code must be a nightmare - try tracking lkml for a while to see what I mean.
The fuse kernel module allows common interface into the VFS layer for "new" filesystem code. Both ntfsprogs (ntfsmount) and ntfs-3g use this. The in-kernel NTFS support is significantly less feature rich than the userspace alternatives - and likely to get more so in the future I would guess.

Thanks allot Estabroo, that's more of a sales pitch. I think I get it now :-)

So in terms of normal everyday use, will it benefit me to change the way I currently work - old fashioned kernel module, mount etc to use this? How different is it to the easy way Gnome does things - volume manager and so on. Does it really make a big difference to the tools we already have that already work?

These kind of technologies are made so everyone can write a driver in user space without needing to know a lot about the kernel internals. The big advantage is that there's no need to wait for some code to get into the kernel to be able to use it without the hassle of patching.

For example, usb scanners and printers have always been problematic. Then someone wrote libusb, a simple interface so any external project can interface directly with the kernel. Now, any user application without root privileges can directly interface with the usb bus to look for an scanner or a printer. This eases the whole process and it works in conjunction with things like sane or cups to bring the linux hardware support to the 20th century.

libusb is an example, fuse is another. Fuse acts as an interface to the filesystem layer of the kernel. Quite a lot of filesystems have been implemented this way. One of the main advantages is -again- that regular users can do lots of things easily like mount or umount volumes themselves. This has always been a pain and you have to hard-wire rules in fstab to be able to do this.

Modern times bring more dynamic hardware configurations, and a static file is not the best way to manage that. ntfs-3g is an example of a driver that uses fuse, sshfs has also been commented above. Another that comes to my mind is zfs-fuse, a port of the sun zfs file system that works on top of fuse.

A fuse alike is for example vhba, which brings us the possibility to have a daemon-tools clone: cdemu. Just like fuse acts as a bridge between the user land and the file system layer in your kernel, vhba acts the same, but this time between the user land and the scsi kernel layer.

Those are features that we have lacked in linux for a long time, and that are speeding the modernization of linux since we can take a lot of things out of the kernel and do them in user land.

In everyday's work you will only notice that linux becomes easier and easier to use, since at this point, users rarely have to worry about things like file systems anymore. Things like this are what makes possible such newbie friendly distros like Ubuntu. At a user level, you don't have to worry about fuse at all since modern kernels bring it and most distros will enable it by default.

There's a couple of excellent descriptions here. Thanks for your time folks!

Linux being easier to accept for the newcomer can only bring it closer to mainstream and I have introduced many newcomers to it. One friends I hadn't seen in a couple of years said "thanks for introducing me, Linux is awesome", and he uses this as his only OS now. It's amazing the learning curve he is going through and is now starting to ask many advanced questions.

I have always opted for the low resource option which is where Linux has excelled for me. I am able to use my old PII 400 computers for my normal everyday stuff without having to resort to buying (albeit cheap) modern hardware. My philosophy is to reuse what we already have before having to buy the latest and greatest.

So I guess in my case, I can continue using what I have without having to worry about new services/features etc and others can have the one click option. Works all round huh?

I hope at least one of the developers of this system and it's components read this because I would like to say thanks for giving it to us.

Regards to all.