Hi Lizards, that’s my first post here! 🙂 so… Thanks for reading!

Well let’s start.

I Red lots of times that users have problems with NTFS usb hard drives. Of course i’m talking about read/write support and ntfs-3g.

Touch and works with /etc/fstab is not a nice idea, also because device name could change and a static mount point will be unusefull.

The solution is to write an hal rule. In this case, all we need is the following:

With you favourite editor create like root that file:

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/20-ntfs-config-write-policy.fdi

and past in it that lines:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- -->
<!--
   Allow read/write mounting of external NTFS devices with ntfs-3g.
    /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/
-->
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="volume.fstype" string="ntfs">
      <match key="@block.storage_device:storage.hotpluggable" bool="true">
          <merge key="volume.fstype" type="string">ntfs-3g</merge>
          <merge key="volume.policy.mount_filesystem" type="string">ntfs-3g</merge>
          <append key="volume.mount.valid_options" type="strlist">locale=</append>
      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

than restart, as root, hal daemon with

hald restart

to make changes working.

If you want you could use my ntfs-3g package on my home repository

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_10.2/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_10.3/
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/anubisg1/openSUSE_11.0/

it is always the last stable ntfs-3g released (right now is 1.2812) and include also the hal rule wrote before.

I hopes that to be usefull for lots.

Andrea 🙂