Comments on: Went crazy and bought a Mac: Thoughts http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2007/06/15/went-crazy-and-bought-a-mac-thoughts/ Paul Betts's personal website / blog / what-have-you Wed, 26 May 2010 09:57:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.5 By: pyr3 http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2007/06/15/went-crazy-and-bought-a-mac-thoughts/comment-page-1/#comment-4394 pyr3 Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:35:13 +0000 http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2007/06/15/went-crazy-and-bought-a-mac-thoughts/#comment-4394 The 'maximize' feature in OS X is supposed to expand the window to fit the content, not fit the window to the screen. Some programs just blindly maximize the window, while others try to fit it to the content. It took me a while to get used to this on OS X when I transitioned from Windows/Linux 5 years ago. As far as cross-platform filesystem support... There is a ext2 driver for OSX, but I've had bad luck with it, Tiger write support seems to only have been added recently (Dec '06 IIRC). The only workable options are NTFS using the NTFS-3G driver with MacFUSE (the OSX port of FUSE). The other option is to use UFS. OS X natively supports UFS, HFS, HFS+, FAT32, NTFS (read-only I think), SMBFS. ( I think that's it ) HFS+ support in Linux is actually pretty good. Most people have problems with it because there aren't fsck/mkfs tools ready-to-go for Ubuntu and such. You can find instructions around (I think there's some on the Gentoo wiki) to build Apple's open-sourced tools mkfs.hfsplus and fsck.hfsplus under Linux. Also keep in mind that HFS+ support in Linux is read-only for Journaled HFS+ volumes. I've also read conflicting things about whether there is write-support for 'case-sensitive'-enabled HFS+ volumes. So keep in mind that to get write support you may need to create the volume as a case-insensitive volume. Another thing to keep in mind is that HFS+ will mount read-only when there are FS errors or the volume was not unmounted cleanly. If you get the fsck for HFS+ installed, then you'll be able to just fsck the volume and get it back to read/write. (I'm sure there is some fstab way to get it to automatically run fsck when trying to mount an volume that wasn't cleanly unmounted, but I haven't fooled around with that). The ‘maximize’ feature in OS X is supposed to expand the window to fit the content, not fit the window to the screen. Some programs just blindly maximize the window, while others try to fit it to the content. It took me a while to get used to this on OS X when I transitioned from Windows/Linux 5 years ago.

As far as cross-platform filesystem support… There is a ext2 driver for OSX, but I’ve had bad luck with it, Tiger write support seems to only have been added recently (Dec ’06 IIRC). The only workable options are NTFS using the NTFS-3G driver with MacFUSE (the OSX port of FUSE). The other option is to use UFS. OS X natively supports UFS, HFS, HFS+, FAT32, NTFS (read-only I think), SMBFS. ( I think that’s it )

HFS+ support in Linux is actually pretty good. Most people have problems with it because there aren’t fsck/mkfs tools ready-to-go for Ubuntu and such. You can find instructions around (I think there’s some on the Gentoo wiki) to build Apple’s open-sourced tools mkfs.hfsplus and fsck.hfsplus under Linux. Also keep in mind that HFS+ support in Linux is read-only for Journaled HFS+ volumes.

I’ve also read conflicting things about whether there is write-support for ‘case-sensitive’-enabled HFS+ volumes. So keep in mind that to get write support you may need to create the volume as a case-insensitive volume. Another thing to keep in mind is that HFS+ will mount read-only when there are FS errors or the volume was not unmounted cleanly. If you get the fsck for HFS+ installed, then you’ll be able to just fsck the volume and get it back to read/write. (I’m sure there is some fstab way to get it to automatically run fsck when trying to mount an volume that wasn’t cleanly unmounted, but I haven’t fooled around with that).

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