Since I’ve just installed a double boot with MacOS X Panther and Kubuntu Dapper, I’ve been wondering how to share datas between both OSes.
I found answers on various forums. I tried a few things, and these are my conclusions (summing up forums on some points):
- Although MacOS claims to support Unix FS, it is a bad idea to use it, cause it doesn’t use the standard (FreeBSD) implementation of it, so Linux won’t recognize it.
- Using FAT would do, but would be weird to share between two Unix systems…
- MacOS doesn’t support ext2 natively. That is very bad for a Unix system, but that’s how it is. There is an ext2 for MacOS project on sourceforge but it doesn’t seem to me like the best option…
- Linux has been supporting hfs+ since quite a lot of time, and Ubuntu’s kernel uses it without a slight problem, so that seems like the best idea. However, recently, the support for writing on hfs+ journalised FS has been disabled by the maintainer because it caused too many bugs. Therefore the best option seems to use not journalised hfs+ for a common partition.
This is what I have in my /etc/fstab to set this partition :
/dev/hda4 /home/medias hfsplus user,rw,umask=022 0 0
Enjoy!