How To Install NTFS-Config in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal ("ntfs-3g" configurator GUI)

When it comes to dealing with NTFS file systems in GNU/Linux... well if you "read" the history... unlike with the simple FAT32, with NTFS, Linux certainly had her issues. Although these days everyone says it's pretty darn safe to write (yikes) NTFS partitions in GNU/Linux yet because of a very bad memory I have, I still have my doubts.

Basically there are two main ways that you can set your NTFS partitions read-only in GNU/Linux. First way is editing your "fstab" files by hand which is not that hard but it certainly ain't that interesting either.

The second option is to find a "decent" GUI that lets you configure the settings that comes with the never ntfs-3g project. If you don't know what that is, then in the past as said before, GNU/Linux had a bad reputation of being notorious while dealing with NTFS file systems, so they created a new project called "ntfs-3g" for letting GNU/Linux users deal with NTFS file-systems better.

Was it successful?, well I for sure won't be trying it find out, because in the past I almost lost my entire HDD data, but that's a long time ago and from the things that I hear these days, ntfs-3g is really good at what it does.

Still if you want to manually/easily change read/write permissions in NTFS partitions in Ubuntu, then I highly recommend you to give a try for this excellent tool called "NTFS-Config".

As said there isn't much to talk about. Once installed it'll detect all your mounted NTFS partitions and let you enable/disable read/write permissions, graphically that is.

In Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, you can install NTFS-config by issuing the below command in your Terminal.

sudo apt-get install ntfs-config

This should install it but after installing I couldn't run it. It gave me the following error.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/ntfs-config", line 102, in <module>
    main(args, opts)
  File "/usr/bin/ntfs-config", line 75, in main
    app = NtfsConfig()
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/NtfsConfig/NtfsConfig.py", line 56, in __init__
    os.mkdir(HAL_CONFIG_DIR)
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/etc/hal/fdi/policy'

Now our only hope is to contact the developer and beg for a new relea... I'm just kidding, you can easily fix it :P. As you can see, I've bold the important one here. So, all we gotta do is create that missing directory, manually.

Again open your Terminal and enter the below commands.

sudo mkdir /etc/hal

sudo mkdir /etc/hal/fdi

sudo mkdir /etc/hal/fdi/policy

Now you should be able to run NTFS-config in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty without any issues whatsoever. Oh, btw, after installing you can run it from the main menu: "System" -> "Administration" -> "NFTS Configuration Tool" or

Simply open your Terminal and enter the below command.

sudo ntfs-config

Enjoy it. And I'd really like give some extra credit to the developer, who ever you are, this is bloody useful :).