Wednesday, August 20, 2008

NTFS-3G 1.2812

Information on what's new in this version of NTFS-3G can be found at the NTFS-3G release page.

Changes for the Mac OS X specific components:
  • Important bugfix: In some cases NTFS-3G attempted to mount other partitions than those containing NTFS file systems, for instance hybrid CD-ROMs. This blocked certain types of media from being mounted. This was caused by incorrect interpretation of exit values from ntfs-3g.probe and has now been fixed.

  • Bugfix: The "Enable debug logging" and "Disable debug logging" scripts did not work as intended, and modified the wrong variable.

  • Bugfix: You can now create NTFS disk images using Disk Utility in Mac OS X 10.5. (This failed previously because of incorrect parsing of parameters.)

  • Improvement: The uninstall script now removes the complete file system bundle dir, instead of just removing the files inside it.

  • Improvement: A user guide to NTFS-3G has been written and is bundled with the install .dmg file as a PDF document.

  • Improvement: Internationalized description strings for the file system have been added for Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Portugese and Korean.

Download NTFS-3G 1.2812 [stable]
Download NTFS-3G 1.2812 [ublio] (patched for improved performance)

Packaging, patching, some OS X-related development and testing has been done by Catacombae Software (i.e. myself).

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4/10.5, a PowerPC or Intel computer, MacFUSE 1.7 or later installed.
This package has been tested with OS X 10.4.11/Intel and OS X 10.5.4/Intel.

Information on how to install and use NTFS-3G for Mac OS X can be found in the User Guide.

Known issues:
  • Files with filenames created in Windows containing international characters with accents, umlauts and similar dots and lines, or filenames with korean characters might seem unreadable in the Finder. This is because Finder apparently expects all filenames to appear in unicode decomposed form, while NTFS allows both composed and decomposed form filenames. This issue is hard to solve in a pretty way, but you should still be able to access these files when using the Terminal. For me, copying the affected files to a HFS+ drive using the command "cp" worked fine.

  • After installing ntfs-3g, all NTFS drives will disappear from the "Startup Disk" preference pane. Disabling or uninstalling ntfs-3g brings them back. I don't have a solution for this, but you can still choose your startup drive by:
    • Holding down the Option key during boot (or Alt for non-Apple keyboards).

    • Intel users only: Install the rEFIt boot manager for better control of the boot process.

    • Using the command line utility bless (see man bless for more information)
    If you have any information on a pretty way of solving this issue, I'd love to hear about it.

Sources:
ntfs-3g 1.2812 (patched)
ntfsprogs 1.13.1
fuse_wait.c
ntfs-3g_daemon.c