Hey how can I view and write Macintosh Partitions/Volumns with Linux. Specifically Slackware 10.0

I think mac's filesystem is hfs. So as root type mount -t hfs /dev/*** /mnt/*** (after you've mkdir'd a mount point, of course). But if you are trying to mount a commercial MAC formatted diskette, you may have to crack it open and either remove or put in one of those little copy-protection tabs, or at least I had to when I tried to do it.

nice, thankx

Unless it's an HFS+ partition! This won't read properly using the hfs filesystem module. There is a suite called "hfsplus" that will allow you to mount and meddle with HFS+ partitions.

A sorry story to tell, though:
I have an old Apple (5500/225 to be precise) and I upgraded it to Debian. At the time of me doing this (for the first time) I was going to night school at my local college to do a CCNA course. The tutor at this college didn't mind if I took my USB-->ATAPI adapter and a spare harddrive in and set up a machine up to download lots of stuff whilst we worked.

I duly downloaded all 7 CDs for Debian/PPC (I didn't have broadband at the time, so an FTP install was out of the question) and took them home. Copied all the ISO images onto my main machine, MD5ed them to check they were OK. Popped this "spare" harddrive into the Apple since that was my original intention. Burned the ISOs to CD. All went well, until it came to using disc 2! This disc was knackered. The ISO was fine, and the CD was fine, but it just refused to read any data from it in the Mac. So, I continued the installation without one of the CDs.

Next week, I remove the harddrive from the Apple. Fire up my main x86 machine and connect the Apple harddrive to it using the USB-->Atapi adapter. Linux sees the disk fine. So, I remove the Linux and SWAP partitions and create a single, large VFAT partition in its space. Format it, mount it, create a test file. Go into college with said harddrive and adapter ready to re-download CD 2, just in case!

Fire up the college's machine (running WinXP). Plug in the adapter. Attach the harddrive. Nothing. Zip, zilch. Since the Windows machine is in the College, it has been locked down, so I can't get to the "Computer Management" console to check out the drive.

Now, even without being able to do that, I knew exactly what the (unsortable-at-college) problem was. The harddrive did indeed contain a VFAT partition, but it was within an Apple partition table! Windows isn't going to see that, now, is it?

So, the moral of my story is this: Linux is absolutely fantastic for filesystem recovery and general file management, but remember that if you make changes under Linux, it may not be readable by other OSs simply because of Linux's extreme flexibility!

It's easier if you are running LinuxPPC on an Apple machine vs X86. You're running x86...right?

Err... who's the question directed to?

And how is it easier to mount HFS (or HFS+) 'volumes' on a PPC machine running Linux than it is on an x86 machine running Linux? So long as you have the hfs filesystem module, and you have it modprobed/insmodded, then how does it make any difference?