Thinkpads Forum

Not so much installation related (as I don't have the system yet...waiting on RDH to get it shipped out to me).

Issues are:

1. This is a deal breaker, and will determine whether I run Ubuntu as my host OS, or as a VMWare emulated OS: I -MUST- have NTFS read/write capability with external hdds.

2. Does anyone know if VMWare images made in the Windows will work in Linux as well? I plan on running VMWare on my system regardless, but if I can run Ubuntu as the host OS (dependent on #1 above), I can eliminate the need for a spare hdd. Otherwise, I'll be stuck running the VMWare ubuntu, which doesn't teach me as much!

3. When new versions of the distros come out, what do you guys do? Reinstall everything? Upgrade?

Thus far, I haven't seen a clear way to do read *and* write of NTFS partitions in Ubuntu. You can do it, but it may not always be totally reliable. Some distros have support for read/write ops to NTFS partitions. The new 2.6 kernels have limited write support. I wouldn't, however, do a write operation on an NTFS system from Linux since that can seriously mess things up. On just a plain disk with an NTFS partition, it works fine; I think the only problem with the NTFS partitioned system disks is that, somehow and somewhere, an extra journaling layer gets put on it. This is actually a pretty neat trick, see

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=120290

You can get third party drivers for doing that as well.

http://www.ntfs-linux.com/

I don't know about the Ubuntu VMware images being made in Windows and how well they work under Linux

When new versions of the distro come out you get an update alert and you download a new kernel image; upon reboot, everything is updated and the new kernel is functional. Carfeful, however, as it changes the menu.lst for the GRUB bootloader; if you have anything special for that, you will have to edit it in GRUB or go in and change it back.

HTH

already got hte answer on Linux VMWare and PC VMWare. They're compatible.

So the only matter now is the NTFS...I'll look at your link.

I don't have anything -VITAL- on the external enclosure...I just want to be able to write to it w/o problem.

are you sure that the external isn't FAT32? most are, from my experience.

If it really is ntfs, you're kinda stuck. The current methods are quite buggy, and cause corruption every once in a while.

if you have any method of switching them over to fat32, that's your best bet.

Paragon for Linux will give you complete read write access to NTFS volumes. It is not open source and you have to buy it.

NTFS is a joke. I tend to just use fat32 for all my "shared media" and use custom scripts ive written to encrypt files that are sensitive.

Otherwise, I tend to put most of my stuff on a local server and remote servers when I need to using various protocols which makes things SUPER easy. That's an easy solution for ya. Stick the usb drive on a second box and use Samba,SSH, or FTP to manage the content.

1. You can use 'captive-ntfs' to read/write ntfs safely. You MUST have access to the windows ntfs driver, because captive like ndiswrapper is a wrapper on top to make it run.

3. When new distro version comes out you can 'dist-update' using apt-get or do clean reinstall. The drawback of a dist-upgrade is you may get a lot of orphaned packages that may need to be axed manually.

The only FAT32 storage I have are my pen drives.

my hdds (80gb and 200gb) are NTFS. I'm not moving them to FAT32.



I'll try the captive NTFS. I've got 2 more Windows systems, and a dozen VMWare setups I can pull the ntfs.sys off of.