So you're going to tell me that I'm not accessing my three NTFS partitions through Slackware right now?
am i? you already told me what i was going to say, but i won't compound the misunderstanding by obliging you.
Ingenious, I say. If not direly incorrect.
perhaps, if i had actually said it. i am impressed by the ability of people to have a two way conversation on their own...
Those fellows have done an awful lot to stabilise NTFS-read access, don't write it off so easily.
should it be difficult to write it off? as you well know, NTFS access is not enabled in most kernels for the reason that write access is still problematic (due to the guesswork required), so unless you are advising windows users to recompile their kernel simply to get linux to work as they want it to (which is something i think nobody should ever advise to someone who is just starting to switch from windows *) then what other options does this person have?
If other blokes would get off their collective arses and do the same, we'd have stable write access by now. It's really not so hard to comprehend - once you have stable read access, you've completed precisely 50% of the requisite work for write access, if not more. All they have to do then is either reverse the kernel module, or attempt to recreate the module from scratch. Sure it's not simple, but you're writing that off as impossible entirely too soon.
two things:
a) if it's so damn easy, then why don't you do it. post back here when you're finished.
b) i clearly misrepresented myself. I meant "impossible at this time, given the information that is available to the general non-microsoft community", i simply meant that read/write support for NTFS had not been implemented for a very long time after NTFS started being used, because the proprietors of the filesystem format in question chose to keep the specs a secret, so i am dubious about it suddenly being 100% working in a commercial product, but not as standard in the kernel. If it can be implemented under one system, then it can clearly be implemented under another, with the correct software, same as the thorny old winmodem issue, sure, drivers for all those rubbish modems can be written, but why bother? just buy a real modem, or get broadband... as a result if you do have one of those shitty modems, you'll have a harder time getting it to work than perhaps you might have expected. anyway i am digressing. you seem to be talking in absolutes, while i am trying to take into account the reality of providing at least the easiest and most cost effective options.
How quickly you forget the progress that had to be made on FAT prior to MS and a number of their former partners deciding to switch to NTFS and dump FAT32 sources into the wild.
Before you go off saying something like that,
like what? like what i actually said? or like what you just errantly claimed i would say?
keep in mind that there's a high degree of probability that bits of NTFS source have been leaked over the past decade, and that somebody somewhere has managed to amalgamate them and find coders competent enough to attempt to decipher the format.
none of this makes it any easier to reverse engineer NTFS access, as you well know if somebody sees the code for something that is under a prohibitive licence, they are not allowed to use the code in their own work without the people responsible for the licence giving them approval. i doubt microsoft would give approval for work based on their code to be used in any free software project, and we all know that most if not all distributors of linux systems include only software released under "free" type licences (in their home user level systems anyway).
Just because Microsoft says it can't be done, that doesn't make their word law. 
did they say that? perhaps they said they don't want it to be done, i have no idea what microsoft said, nor do i care, i also don't really care about ntfs access under linux either. linux has several perfectly good journaling filesystems and (contrary to what Aled Jones might suggest) does not need support for a closed source one from a company renowned for bringing out flawed software for nearly thirty years.
* because 1) it's just showing off that you consider a kernel recompile to be easy, while knowing a newbie will find it hard and will be intimidated, and 2) recompiling the kernel of an operating system should not be necessary to solve problems like this, at least not all the time, think about it, if people used to use windows, and never needed to recompile to fix problems, and now they use linux and need to recompile all the time, how is that better?
not that i necessarily think these things myself, you understand, but newbies will almost invariably see it this way.
