ext2 for OS X / accessing ro-mounted ext3 partitions in MOL

[Thomas Otto]

> Not really mol related, more an interoperability question.
> 
> Did anyone tried this ext2 support for OS X to access Linux ext2
> partitions?
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/

Yes I am using it and it seem to work fine. Yet the UI in the System 
Preferences has yet to be improved, you can't enable read-only access 
until you mount the partition rw once, also if you disable automount the 
partitions no longer showed up here, I had to manually edit the XML file 
/Library/Preferences/net.sourceforge.ext2fsx.ExtFSManager.plist to get 
them back.

Also works fine with ext3 paritions since this format is backwards 
compatible to ext2.

> I'm assuming from the little information I found that it provides a
> kernel module and will be able to access ext2 partition transparently,
> so the ext2 partitions can be mounted, right?
> 
> What do you think if I share a home directory (ext2 partition) between
> OS X and my Linuxes?  Would it cause any problems?

Should work fine, the only thing OS X creates is a .Trashes folder on 
the rootdir of each mounted parition.

If you literary mean to have /home/david on linux and /Users/David on OS 
X on the same paritition you might have to adjust the uids and maybe the 
'Desktop' folder is also used by some Linux desktop.

Write support is enabled by default for some versions now according to 
the changelog and since ext2 is an open format it should work fine. 
Certainly a better idea than letting Linux write on hfsplus at the moment.



Also to get this mail *on* topic mounting an ext3 volume is possible 
under OS X running in MOL with the following line in molrc.osx (-ro only 
to be on the safe side)
     blkdev:             /dev/hda7       -ro -force
and unmounting /dev/hda7 while starting mol. Afterwards I could mount it 
again under linux rw without complaints from either linux or OS X yet no 
remounting was possible under OS X then.

If I had it mounted rw startmol would report
   "Disk /dev/hda7                       <read-only>  4248 MB"

yet then is says

------> /dev/hda7 is linux-mounted with write privileges.
Could not open '/dev/hda7' with read-write permissions

In OS X a /dev/disk1 was present and ext2fsx showed it as an
"Ibrium MOL-Disk Media" yet refused to mount this volume.


I wonder because it is possible to start MOL while the hfs parition is 
mounted ro under linux so why wouldn't it be possible vice versa - rw 
under linux, ro in OS X.

mol version 0.9.69+20040307-1 and OS X 10.3.2 here, not quite up to 
date, I know :)


HTH

       -Thomas

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