Native mounting of HFS+ on Pandora

[origimbo]

Apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, but so far I've only been able to find very old material, which no longer appears relevant.

I'm trying to use the pandora in a mixed Apple/Linux environment, and as such it would be nice to be able use a permissions aware file system supported on both sides of the fence (for removable media, not the NAND). Given that open source is more adaptable than closed, I think that means HFS+ unjournaled. Given the kernel underlying SuperZaxxon is this likely to be possible? Or is there an obvious alternative I should be considering?

 

[notaz]

At least Linux HFS+ filesystem module can be compiled if you like, not sure if that's enough for you.

 

[origimbo]

I suspect it would be a good start, thank you.

If I could beg more advice, do you have any tips (eg. is there an Angstrom package that'll work, if I do it myself is it simpler to recompile the whole kernel with the module added, can I just do this using the development package on the device itself), or am I better off learning by breaking things?

 

[notaz]

It's not trivial to compile compatible modules, you'd most likely need to recompile full kernel (wanted to link you to instructions on pandorawiki but noticed they are out of date).

Anyway for this reason I'm providing module compiling service, here is your module:

http://notaz.gp2x.de/misc/pnd/ko/3.2.45/

(you need latest firmware with all updates to use it)

 

[Linux-SWAT]

In case of emergency, i provided easy instructions to recompile the kernel under Slackware:

http://pandorawiki.org/Software_projects/OS/Slackware/Advanced_usage/Kernel

Kernel + modules can be copied into Zaxxon after this.

 

[origimbo]

Thank you both, and notaz in particular. I've got the module installed and am merrily mounting my hfs+ partitions on both the Pandora and my mac.

 

[A2000]

Now that's interesting. How do I use this module? Is it possible to read HFS+ journaled, too?

 

[hmc]

Wow, great! Please report your experiences with this module. I'll be a glad user of it, too, in about two weeks when I will be back from vacations.

 

[origimbo]

A2000: I'm probably not the best person to tell you what you ought to do, but what I think I did, mostly from the terminal:

1) Make sure your system is up to date on the firmware.

2) get the file onto the pandora somewhere sensible. I put mine at

/lib/modules/3.2.45/kernel/fs/hfsplus/hfsplus.ko

which I *think* is standard.

3) update the module dependencies

sudo depmod -a

4) Test load the file

sudo modprobe hfsplus

So far I haven't added the commands to autoload it on boot, but it certainly doesn't seem to be making the system unstable.

My understanding was that having journaling on made mounting writable much more difficult/impossible. This may well be old information though.

hmc: So far everything's "just worked as regards auto mounting, etc.I did have one instance where a partition switched to read only (no data loss), but I was experiment with swapfiles at the time. I certainly haven't stress tested it, but it's well up to my other experiences of using hfs+ on linux.

 

[A2000]

^Just overlooked your answer to hmc regarding the automount. Therefor I searched the web for fstab lines and mount options. Then having the terminal in fullscreen I typed in the mount command only to read that my harddisk was already mounted *facepalm*. I didn't care about journaling as I hadn't the intention to write to the disk. Mounted as read/write and there was no warning. Then I watched the beginning of a movie read from a disk roughly 2-3 times bigger than my Pandora  . Only slight drawback is vlc (or any other player I tried so far) as there are some glitches. But hey, I didn't expect to be able to play it at all in the first place.

Thank you notaz for providing the module and thank you origimbo for explaining how to use it!

 

[notaz]

Sounds like I should just include it with next firmare kernel update then.