Captive NTFS

Captive is a system developed by Jan Kratochvil free program package, with which it first became possible around 2005, under Linux on the proprietary file system NTFS safely write access. This reached captive by the integration of the original ntfs.sys driver of Windows XP.

Captive is no longer developed since January 2006 and is due to mature alternatives also no longer required.

Background

NTFS is the standard file system of Microsoft operating systems in the NT series. The specifications of NTFS are not publicly available. Though Linux developers have been trying since 1995 to write NTFS driver, it took about ten years to this endeavor was realized successfully with NTFS - 3G. When this goal was achieved, the development of Captive - NTFS was, logically enough abandoned.

Pros and Cons

Captive NTFS presented for the first time provides the ability to fully and securely access NTFS file systems. However, it had an extremely high memory requirements. The accesses were also significantly slowed by emulating a Windows environment.

To use the Microsoft driver, who was not part of Captive and had to be recharged, a Windows license was required as in normal operation of Windows.

Implementation

Captive NTFS avoided the problems of the Linux NTFS driver own by causing ntfs.sys running Microsoft Windows XP in a sandbox the original driver. With the aid of components of the free Windows NT replica ReactOS January Kratochvil developed a compatibility layer that faking a Windows environment, the driver and made ​​him so useful. Transparent access to the file system (ie, a direct from the perspective of applications and users access that is not different from that on native file systems ) was made possible by this software has been integrated with the FUSE userland filesystem in the kernel.

Alternatives

During the year 2005, the Linux - NTFS project has reached a high degree of support for NTFS. Thus, with certain restrictions, are now newly created files, deleted and resized. These functions are, however, only gradually integrated into the Linux kernel.

The further functions that are implemented in the issued by the Linux - NTFS project libraries, can be use for utilities ntfsmount ( package ntfstools ) and NTFS-3G, which in turn rely on FUSE ( Filesystem in Userspace ) to partitions available in the file system to make. NTFS - 3G is the newer of the two programs and only has the different architecture of Windows and Linux -related limitations.

A commercial alternative is NTFS for Linux, the company Paragon, but its free trial version supports only read access, which is in any case already been fully implemented in the Linux kernel.

Swell

• FUSE
• Linux software