OT question about Macbook (OS X) file systems

[Dean S. Messing]

George N. White III wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Dean S. Messing wrote:
> 
> > I just purchaced a Macbook for my daughter as she's off to college 
> > (required by the dept. she's in).  I'm wondering if OS X understands the 
> > ext3 filesysystem.  In particular, will it properly handle symlinks 
> > generated under linux?  I wd. like to give her a USB disk containing an 
> > ext3 filesystem (that has lots of symlinks) with her 25 Gig organised 
> > classical music library on it (done on an F8 system).
> 
> Why not just set up the USB disk using the mac and rsync the files
> across via networking?

Thanks for the suggestion, George.

Were I to bring my own (FC-6) laptop to Chicago, where she's attending
school, that might be an option.  We'll pick up the MacBook at the
bookstore there on Thurday.  But I have not a clue about how to get
networking working on it, so even if I brought my own linux laptop
(for truly local area networking) I'm not sure of myself at all.

What I'd hoped to do is be able to hand her the drive and have it "just
work".  She knows as much about computers in general as I do about
Macs (zero).  (She spent all her free time the last 7 years training
to be a concert grade pianist :-)

She'll likely be on the network in a few days via the school's IT dept.
but then I have no idea if I'd be able to get 25-30Gigs of data to her
via rsync/ssh. Does the school disallow it through their firewall?
Does the Mac have the server for me to connect to?  I don't know
the answer to any of these.  

Besides this (andthe Macbook) was suppose to be my (hassle-free) gift
to her. :-)


> OS X doesn't do ext3.  You might be able to create an HFS+ filesystem
> (I mount my HFS+ iPOD and write to it with linux, but there are
> warnings "write on journalled filesystem not supported").  OS X does
> have zfs and linux has fuse+zfs, so that might be worth a try too.

I just called the local Apple store and they said that zfs is not
natively supported under OS X (yet).  The 4 that are, are:
XFS, XFS+, Fat, and NTFS.

I suppose I can write an NTFS FS to the drive but I don't
know if the symlinks will work.  I think I read that true NTFS symlinks
are a recent thing.  I'l look into creating an HFS+ FS under linux
(with journalling turned off as per your warning above.
I've got till tomorrow to solve this.  That's when I fly out.

Thanks again.
Dean