NTFS write support for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (the development codename) has a fairly easy way to enable write mode on NTFS partitions. Writing on such partition is safe since release 1.0 of NTFS-3G, and it is included in Ubuntu Feisty’s Universe repository.

To use it, one should enable the Universe repository and install ntfs-3g package (see Ubuntu documentation about installing software) and that’s almost it.

You can now either update manually your partition configuration file (/etc/fstab) to use ntfs-3g driver instead of the default ntfs. Or you could use the ntfs-config package which does the trick taking care for you about the local settings or external hard drive. Who said Linux was not easy?

If you manually edit /etc/fstab, the line should look like this:

Original version
UUID=uuid /media/hda1 ntfs defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1
NTFS-3G version
UUID=uuid /media/hda1 ntfs-3g defaults,locale=fr_FR.utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 1

To check which locales are supported on your system, you can try the ‘locale -a’ command in a terminal.

With ntfs-config, in the menu Applications -> System Tools -> NTFS Configuration Tool and follow on-screen instructions (see figure below).

NTFS Configuration Tool (ntfs-config)