Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Tuxera NTFS for Mac gets more reviews

Mikko Välimäki
on January 26, 2010
in mac and ntfs
. 0 comments

Following the latest release, Tuxera NTFS for Mac is receiving positive reviews all over the net. For example movie and television industry veteran David Roth Weiss has in mind a use case where large movie files are post-produced on a Mac and then submitted to clients who have PCs:

Until Tuxera, the 4Gb file size limitation made it impossible to copy files over 4Gb to a FAT32 formatted drive, and NTFS formatted drives could only be read on Macs, writing to them was not possible. … that could be a real deal breaker for many editors on Macs. Tuxera changes all that, and creates a seamless method for delivering files on hard drives to your PC-based clients.

Earlier also MacObserver picked Tuxera as the NTFS solution for Mac.

As a final note, Softpedia gave us “100% CLEAN” award :)
softpedia_clean_award_f

Release: Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2010.1

Erik Larsson
on January 20, 2010
in mac and ntfs
. 0 comments

The latest release of Tuxera NTFS for Mac is now out!

Note: This release contains an important bugfix for the issue described in KB974729. All users are urged to update as soon as possible.

Changes since 2009.10:

  • A fix for the issue described in KB974729, in which NTFS drives were rendered unmountable in Windows Vista and Windows 7 in rare cases after being used extensively with Tuxera NTFS for Mac or NTFS-3G. After this update, Tuxera NTFS for Mac will no longer trigger this condition.
    To fix existing drives, please install the hotfix provided by Microsoft and follow instructions.
    If you have been affected by this issue and need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact our premium support email address (see your activation email).
  • Performance improvements: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now includes many of the improvements featured in Tuxera NTFS for Embedded systems, designed to further increase performance and reduce unnecessary driver workload, especially when working with many smaller files and traversing large directory hierarchies.
    For example, when crawling a test volume recursively, 2010.1 was nearly 40% faster than 2009.10 in our tests.
  • Performance improvements: The caching layer has been improved with more efficient lookup, which means less CPU overhead, and measures have been taken to minimize the amount of excess data that is read when accessing files in a random fashion.
  • Feature: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now includes a new preference pane option “Disable recovery dialog for hibernated volumes”, which makes the driver ignore NTFS volumes that contain a hibernated Windows session instead of showing a dialog asking the user whether it wants to purge the hibernated state or abort mounting.
  • Bugfix: Fix for some users of Snow Leopard who had problems with formatting NTFS volumes (Tuxera NTFS was not displayed as a formatting option at all times).
  • Fix: General usability improvements in the installer and preference pane.
  • Fix: Minor fixes to improve compatibility with the built-in NTFS driver.
  • Experimental: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now attempts to mount Windows LDM partitions by default. This will not work at all times, but one user did benefit from this change.

Release: NTFS-3G 2010.1.16

Szabolcs Szakacsits
on January 17, 2010
in ntfs
. 1 comment

Happy New Year 2010 To All Tuxera Users!

The first open source NTFS-3G stable release of the year contains only important bug fixes:

  • Fix: Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 couldn’t access a volume, file or directory if it had a non-resident TXF_DATA attribute despite being allowed by the NTFS $AttrDef attribute specification file. This scenario is very rare and hard to reproduce. Currently we have 1900 downloads a day and received only very a few such problem reports. Solution is also available from Microsoft. Please see more information at KB974729. Upgrade is recommended!
  • Fix: NTFS-3G may crashed if a junction point referred to a non-ASCII file.
  • Fix: Compilation errors on Mac OS X, OpenSolaris and openSUSE.

The source code of the latest stable driver is available at http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/

Many thanks to Microsoft, Jean-Pierre Andre, Erik Larsson, Anton Altaparmakov, Dominique Leuenberger, John G. Ireland, Virial, Elby, and Fuzzf.

Tuxera Open Source Team

CES and Windows CE markets

Mikko Välimäki
on January 10, 2010
in consumer electronics, microsoft and windows
. 0 comments

We have been walking our legs flat the last four days at Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, meeting valued customers and partners from all over the world. Perhaps the biggest benefit one can get from a huge event like this — in addition to catching market trends — is to have face-to-face time with all those one has communicated with over email and phone during the year.

We decided CES is the right time to go public with our Windows CE work. The most common use case must be Windows CE powered set-top boxes and other consumer electronic devices with a USB plug. If I want to upload my videos and music from a portable NTFS-formatted hard drive into the box, it must read NTFS.

ces_ms

Another relevant market are cars, where Windows CE is gaining momentum. At CES, Microsoft had driven Fiats, Fords and Kias on their booth. Window CE is running the “infotainment” or entertainment systems in these cars. But what if I want plug in the car stereo my portable NTFS-formatted hard drive, which is full of MP3s? Yes, the system should read NTFS.