I’m writing this post from my new 15″ Powerbook. It is extremely nice. I love the OS but the look and feel of the Powerbook alone is awesome as well. I love how everything “just works†yet has the underlying power of a Unix system. The only hurdle that I have to overcome now is how to access my music/movies that are on my external drive. The file system on it is ext3. There exists a ext3 driver for Windows and there had been one for OS X, but the Tiger update changed something so it doesn’t work. If anyone has any suggestions for accessing an ext3 partition while in OS X Tiger, please let me know. Also, does anyone know of a plugin for the newest version of iTunes to allow it to play Ogg Vorbis? The current plugin does not support iTunes 5. Thanks!
I have exactly the same problem. I moved from windoze to OSX, and killed all my windoze boxen, replacing them with Fedora Core 4. I now serve all my MP3s with iTunes running on Codeweavers Crossove on the FC4 box, so music is alll running ok. The only problem is the 70gigs of movies I have on an ext3 formatted Crossfire Firewire drive.
There was a tool that allowed you to read and write to ext2 under OSX http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/ but it is broken on the new versions of OSX.
What we all want to know is, why on earth hasn’t Apple included ext3 in OSX? We can mount FAT 16/32 and NTFS….wtf?
Hmm. Despite how good iTunes is, if you have to run it through emulation I would recommend Amarok instead. It is an excellent opensource program that functions like iTunes…and most likely better because it will be running natively. However, for accessing an ext3 partition on a Mac I did this:
I knew that Linux had native ext3 support and excellent hfs+ (the Apple file system)
support. So, I downloaded the PPC version of Ubuntu linux, booted into
that, mounted my ext3 external drive (ubuntu does this automatically)
and mounted my Mac drive. To change boot priority in a newer Mac, just
hold down the option key while starting the computer until the
selection choice appears. I was able to copy everything that I needed
to the Mac drive and then repartition the external drive with the hfs+
journaled file system. This file system works great in Linux and,
obviously, OS X, but freeware support in Windows does not yet exist.
So, what I ended up doing was creating a 15GB FAT32 partition and
leaving the rest as hfs+. FAT32 works great in OS X. So now I can copy
whatever files that I want and a Windows machine is able to read/write
to the FAT32 partition.
The Linux portion was relatively easy, while creating a Windows
compatible FAT32 partition proved to be more difficult. Luckily, I
found some sites that are extremely helpful and walk through this
exact procedure.
http://jclark.org/weblog/Miscellany/ubuntumount.html
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030613121738812
(In these comments, scroll down almost the entire way and find the
comment entitled, “Create a bootable HFS+ partition and a FAT32
partition on one external drive.†It will be authored by silentaccord
on Fri, Apr 15 ‘05 at 06:32PM.)
Remember, make sure that you have everything vital backuped up on the
external drive because you will lose data when you partition.