26 Accessing file systems with FUSE #
FUSE is the acronym for Filesystem in Userspace.
This means you can configure and mount a file system as an unprivileged
user. Normally, you need to be
root
for this task. FUSE alone is
a kernel module. Combined with plug-ins, it allows you to extend FUSE to
access almost all file systems like remote SSH connections, ISO images, and
more.
26.1 Configuring FUSE #
Before you can use FUSE, you need to install the package
fuse
. Depending which file system
you want to use, you need additional plug-ins available as separate
packages.
Generally you do not need to configure FUSE. However, it is a good idea to
create a directory where all your mount points are combined. For example,
you can create a directory ~/mounts
and insert your
subdirectories for your different file systems there.
26.2 Mounting an NTFS partition #
NTFS, the New Technology File System, is the default file system of Windows. Since under normal circumstances the unprivileged user cannot mount NTFS block devices using the external FUSE library, the process of mounting a Windows partition described below requires root privileges. Mounting NTFS partitions is supported on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop with SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension only.
Become
root
and install the packagentfs-3g
. It is available in SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension.Create a directory that is to be used as a mount point, for example,
~/mounts/windows
.Find out which Windows partition you need. Use YaST and start the partitioner module to see which partition belongs to Windows, but do not modify anything. Alternatively, become
root
and execute/sbin/fdisk
-l
. Look for partitions with a partition type ofHPFS/NTFS
.Mount the partition in read-write mode. Replace the placeholder DEVICE with your respective Windows partition:
>
ntfs-3g /dev/DEVICE MOUNT POINTTo use your Windows partition in read-only mode, append
-o ro
:>
ntfs-3g /dev/DEVICE MOUNT POINT -o roThe command
ntfs-3g
uses the current user (UID) and group (GID) to mount the given device. To set the write permissions to a different user, use the commandid
USER
to get the output of the UID and GID values. Set it with:#
id tux uid=1000(tux) gid=100(users) groups=100(users),16(dialout),33(video) ntfs-3g /dev/DEVICE MOUNT POINT -o uid=1000,gid=100Find additional options in the man page.
To unmount the resource, run fusermount -u
MOUNT POINT.
26.3 More information #
For more information, see the home page of FUSE at https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse.