Viewing Files from the Windows Side of Your Computer


When you install SUSE Linux on a computer that already has some form of Windows running on it, YaST will offer to run the two operating systems side by side. Linux will then repartition the computer, and the GRUB bootloader adds Windows to its list of boot options.

In this instance, SUSE Linux also creates a /windows directory to make all Windows files accessible to you directly in Linux. Depending on the file systems you are using on either side of your computer, you may not even notice a difference in how a file behaves.

MS-DOS and all versions of Windows up to the introduction of Windows NT ran on the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. All Linux file systems (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS) fully support FAT. That is, you can open files from a FAT formatted volume, edit them, and save them either on the Linux volume or back to the FAT formatted volume. If you edit a Windows file in Linux and save it back to the same directory, you can open that file again in Windows.

The main reason this works so well is that FAT is not a permission-based file system. If you copy a Linux file to a FAT partition, the copy won't have permissions attached to it, but it will be completely readable in the other OS.

Starting with Windows NT, Microsoft created a proprietary permissions-based file system called NTFS, which is the default file system in Windows 2000, 2003, and XP. The transition to this file system has been good for Windows users because NTFS uses disk space more efficiently than FAT, and having permissions on files and directories is more secure. Because Microsoft has not shared many of the details of the file system, Linux support is somewhat less transparent.

Thus, most files on an NTFS volume are read-only on Linux. You can still open and edit these files in a Linux application, but you cannot save the changes back to the NTFS volume. You can, however, save or copy a Linux file to a FAT-formatted floppy or Zip disk, and then open and save to an NTFS volume.

Note

You can play most multimedia (music and video) files stored on an NTFS partition in Linux. Because there's no editing/saving going on, the only potential problem lies in support for the format. Linux multimedia player applications such as MPlayer and Helix support some Windows Media features. See Chapter 10, "Sights, Sounds, and Other Fun Things," for more information.


If you edit a lot of files in both operating systems, you should strongly consider creating a small FAT partition to store your data files.

On the other side of the computer, Windows has no native support for reading any Linux file system. Some shareware applications enable you to view files on the Linux Extended File System (ext2 and ext3), but none of these currently support the SUSE Linux default file system: ReiserFS.

  • Learn more about Linux file systems in Chapter 18, "Managing Files, Volumes, and Drives."



SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed
SUSE Linux 10.0 Unleashed
ISBN: 0672327260
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 332

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