NTFS in Linux is not complete stable yet. Anyway, the state of the art is not that far from perfect. I'm talking about NTFS-3G which enables both read and write operation using user space driver cooperated with FUSE. By the way, it is still in beta and the latest version has just released on December 12, 2006 or about 6 days ago. In other words, NTFS-3G has not been tightly integrated into Ubuntu Edgy yet.

Install NTFS-3G on Ubuntu Edgy is quite easy since it is already available in Universe.

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

Anyway, that version is not the most recent one. If you want to have to latest one, add below repository to /etc/apt/sources.lst.

deb http://flomertens.keo.in/ubuntu/ edgy main

Then you are able to mount as follow.

ntfs-3g /dev/sda5 /media/mobile

Note that /media/mobile directory must be existed and additionally, removable devices are still mounted with built-in NTFS driver so you have to umount them before manually mounting with ntfs-3g. If you would like to automatically mount removable devices with NTFS-3G, add below repository.

deb http://flomertens.keo.in/ubuntu/ edgy main-all

Next time you plugs the devices, ntfs-3g will be used to mount via pmount correctly. For more information, please read the full thread.

Tags: ubuntu, edgy, ntfs, ntfs-3g