NTFS-3G instead of NTFS-3G-NG

[mecho]

Is it possible to substitute ntfs-3g-ng with ntfs-3g and take advantage of the regular updates without braking the system. The ntfs-3g-ng is never updated. I tried to do it, but pcmanfm won't mount drives afterwards.
My question is - is there any config file which can be reconfigured to use ntfs-3g and have pcmanfm mount normally

[klaus2008]

I think that the program ntfs-3g used is the one inside the initial ramdisk minirt.gz. Thus you have to update your initial ramdisk with an updated ntfs-3g. This new program, I think, has to be a statically linked executable file which may not use any call to a shared library. I do not think that the Debian packages include such a file.

[mecho]

I don't quite understand your answer, but for it means if I don't understand the answer then I should not touch it. Thanks anyway

[fadirocks]

well I went already with the updates now I can't even revert back to ntfs-3g-ng it's not showing up in synaptic and ntfs-config is not holding settings for external HDs argh!!!

[mecho]

I also broke my system trying to do it, but I keep a back-up of my entire knoppix usb under windows and it was easy for me to restore to the previous working state. I can try and repackage ntfs-3g-ng from my instalation for you and upload it somewhere, but I am not sure if it would work. This is somewhat modified version of the original ntfs-3g and I can not figure what the difference is

[kl522]

ntfs-ng, despite the name 'ng' ( next generation ), is actually less recent compared to the ntfs-3g maintained by Tuxera. For your NTFS integrity, please don't use ntfs-ng.

[mecho]

Thank you for reply kl522, but that's exactly what we are trying to do. Substitute ntfs-3g-ng with ntfs-3g.
Knoppix comes with ntfs-3g-ng by default and there are no updates for it.
The thing is that after installing ntfs-3g, pcmanfm won't mount ntfs drives anymore. There is Arch Linux link which I think would be helpful, but I did not try it.
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCManFM
I would need some free time to try and see if it's working

[kl522]

OK you try it out and let us know. For me I have also completey removed ntfs-ng. I have also removed pcmanfm. I am using pcmanfm version 2. But the pcmanfm mounting ntfs thing is still not very robust. Mounting from root scripts/commands is not a problem but mounting from pcmanfm can sometimes fail. I don't quite bother to fix it, since don't plug in and plug out NTFS formatted USB.

[mecho]

@kl522

I tested the new ntfs-3g just as I promised.It works just fine with a little tweak to /usr/sbin/rebuildfstab.
Turns out that the new ntfs-3g is incompatible with some of the options in fstab which rebuildfstab generates.
Line 104 in rebuldfstab reads ntfs*) options="${options},umask=000";; where ${options}=noauto,users,exec
I changed the line to read ntfs*) options="ro,noauto,umask=000";; I added ro because I only need ntfs mounted in read only mode, removed ${options} and added noauto. Now pcmanfm mounts ntfs just fine
I guess the option users is the incompatible option, not 100% sure though, because I removed both users and exec

[kl522]

After reading your post, I go and try it again, you know what, I don't have the problem of unable to mount ntfs anymore with pcmanfm2 ! I don't know what has caused the difference, perhaps due to some of the newer libraries I upgraded. So since it is not broken now, I am not going to fix it !