Parallels using MacFUSE to access NTFS

Hi, I have 3 windows softwares (2 of them need dongle to run--in flash drive) that I would like to run on Mac with paralles or bootcamp. I have just tried to intall and run 2 of them in a Mac shop with no success. Installation was fine but the software do not work, one of them needs a dongle, and the machine could not see the dongle at all, and kept asking for it. Can anyone please tell me whether or not Windows software with dongle would run in Mac? In case there is some who use them the software are: ASTRA (Wyatt technology), FAST (EdinburgInstruments) and Fluoressence (Jobin Horiba Yvon). Many thanks.

Funny how everybody credits Google for NTFS read-write support on Mac OS.

The reality is that Google just ported Linux FUSE (the ability to write filesystems in userland) to Mac OS. One FUSE module implements NTFS by glueing the FUSE API to the libntfs-3g API.

But make no mistake, the real work is done by libntfs-3g, whose authors should be credited instead. See http://www.ntfs-3g.org/about.html for details.

Parallels also has the ability to modify an NTFS filesystem from their main binary (i.e. without using MacFUSE). They use it to modify an NTFS Boot Camp volume before booting it in a virtual machine. I wonder what code they use to achieve that.

Jonathan, MacFUSE doesn't use the GTResourceFork class!!

Yes, the class is used in the filesystems-objc wrapper code which is in the external branch of the Google project for MacFUSE, but that's just the code they used for MacWorld demos. That's not the same as MacFUSE and is even in a totally different source tree branch. Parallels is using Google's MacFUSE kernel code and library.

It may merely be a difference in how I'm using Parallels 3.0, but I haven't had any difficulty with it butting heads with MacFUSE 0.4 which I've installed manually.

As for the license issue, that could get hairy especially if there's an APSL violation.

FWIW VMware has their own NTFS implementation that could do this, so assuming they mirror the features of Parallels I would assume such a feature to be not too far off for those of us going with the incumbent.

(VMWare's NTFS code is in VirtualCenter's deployment tool and also probably part of their P2V products)

I wrote one of the classes that MacFUSE uses (GTResourceFork), and I can't help but notice that Parallels does not include me in the credits. GTResourceFork is licenced under the old MIT licence.

Though it may seem trivial, I believe this may be a licence violation. :(

Ahh, looking closer, MacFUSE is released under the New BSD license. So it might be a non-issue. However, from what I've read elsewhere, MacFUSE source contains references to both GPL and APSL. If that's true and any modifications to those portions of the codebase took place, then they would still have some obligations. It's complicated :)

I'll find out what I can.

I'll find out what I can.

I kind of assumed this was known, I've had several error messages about MacFUSE related errors and guessed that it was already mentioned in some documentation or feature listing I'd never read. Good to see it brought to light for others that were lucky enough to avoid these errors, of course.

Also, this is interesting as I'd seen others complaining about MacFUSE issues with 3.0 installed, but at the time nobody had mentioned that it was actually part of 3.0 or a version behind the main release. Artifex is right, there should be an inquiry as to the use of this in Parallels and if the company is respecting the software's original license.