I have installed both Ubuntu and Haiku on my old Laptop.
Ubuntu 10.10 has functionality a usual, that means both wireless and wired connections, Haiku has only wired network.
As I found out Ubuntu does not see any Haiku drive, the partition where Haiku resides is from type “unknown” and on the other hand Haiku does not see the Ubuntu drive or partition from type Ext4.
I would like to get access from Haiku to Ubuntu and perhaps vice versa.
My intention is to get files to complete Haiku or other stuff by Ubuntus wireless connections where wired network is not available.
One solution is of course using memory sticks.
What has to be done to get Haiku able to access the ext4 filesystem?
A read-only filesystem driver for the Haiku filesystem “BFS” may be included in Ubuntu. You can check from a shell prompt with by typing ‘modinfo befs’
If you get a response describing the GPL’d driver by Will Dyson, you should be able to use it to manually mount the BFS drive used for Haiku and read files from there. I’m not sure how useful that is to you. On the other hand, if you get an error saying that it could not find this module, then Ubuntu does not include this driver, presumably because BeOS is long abandoned.
There is no ext4 filesystem driver for Haiku. A read-only ext2 driver exists, and some work was done on an ext3 driver over the summer. Other obstacles (if you have used them) include whole disk encryption and logical volumes (and RAID but on a laptop that’s unlikely) none of which are compatible with Haiku.
Many thanks for your precise answer!
Yes, I get a short description about this befs driver and you are right being in doubt if this is very useful for me.
If any I need writing access to Haiku although there no one hint about readonly in this short description.
Thank you once more.
As of r39886, the extent feature of ext4 is supported. Though at least one unsupported feature (for instance flex_bg) can prevent you from mounting an ext4 partition on Haiku.
It’s possible and not too painful, I might add, depending on what filesystem you use under Ubuntu. IIRC, going into /lib/modules/2.6.35-23-generic/kernel/fs/befs and executing a sudo insmod befs will insert the BFS filesystem module into the kernel and then mounting your Haiku partition is easy. Obviously it will be slightly different if you’re using a different kernel version.
For moving files around I use a “pull” model – I use Reiser because of all of the small files I have lying around – so I will boot into one OS and copy files from the other because each has read-only access to the other’s filesystem. Ext4 shouldn’t be too much different in that respect.
There’s no need to take such a complicated and roundabout route, if you explicitly mount a named filesystem (e.g. sudo mount -t befs /dev/your-beos-partition /mnt ) the Linux kernel will automatically ask the module loader to find and insert a suitable module.
I run Linux Mint 14 XFCE from a USB stick and it finds and mounts the two Haiku partitions on my netbook’s HD just fine and I can read and write to them. You could try that instead of Ubuntu.
Good point. Furthermore most partitioning software will create FAT/FAT32 partitions, so you don’t even have to have Windows installed to do it. External hard drives are usually already partitioned as FAT32 when you buy them from the store, so they can also be used to exchange files.
