Using exFAT in Puppy....

[mikewalsh]

Evening, gang.

Now then; most of you have probably heard of exFAT, but may not necessarily be quite certain what it is.

It's basically an 'upgraded' FAT32.....and one of the most important aspects is that it's NOT limited to a max of 4GB file-sizes (unlike its older relative).

I looked into using this for 'transfer' purposes earlier today. I've re-purposed the old PATA/IDE SSD from ye anciente Inspiron lappie that died year before last; instead of having ChromeOS-Flex on a thumbdrive like I did last year (it was needed for something else), I now have have it on the Kingspec SSD, which hooks up to my main rig through a PATA-to-SATA converter and a SATA-to-USB 3.0 cable. Runs nicely, too!

I didn't want to bother trying a full install of ChromeOS to the SSD, so it's been left in USB 'trial' mode. This lets me do just about everything, apart from being able to download files directly across to Puppy. It's one limitation of the 'trial' mode, but.....as ever, there ARE 'workarounds'. Probably the simplest is the old chestnut of having a 'common' partition that's readable/writable from both OSs, and this is the route I chose. There are 3 formats ChromeOS is happy interacting with; NTFS (no way in hell!).....FAT32 (tried this, but kept getting "Insufficient permissions"??!?).....and the last is exFAT, the modern 'successor' to its older sibling, FAT32.

So, I decided to look into this last one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A heavily upgraded & customized Xenialpup64 is my current "daily driver". gParted shows 'exFAT', though it's greyed-out.....meaning gParted SHOULD support it if the appropriate utility packages are installed......yes? More on this in a moment.

There's 2 routes to achieving this, depending on your Pup's vintage. For Fossapup64 and older, you need to install

• exfat-utils, and

• exfat-fuse

.....from the PPM. For any newer Pups, the package to install appears to be

• exfatprogs

.....again, from the PPM.

From what I understand, newer builds of gParted automatically pick up on this stuff and 'exFAT' is available for use. In older builds, even with the correct packages installed 'exFAT' remains greyed-out. No problem; we do it via CLI instead!

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Make sure to get the correct label for the drive and/or partition you want to format to exFAT. Make sure, too, that it's not mounted.....or this won't work. Then, open a terminal.....and all you type in is

Code: Select all

mkfs.exfat -n LABEL /dev/sdXn

.....where LABEL is replaced by whatever label you wish to use, and sdXn is the drive/partition you wish to re-format. (Seems it's easier to re-format an existing filesystem to exFAT than it is to create it from scratch, apparently, so this is what I did; initially formatted to FAT32 with gParted, THEN re-formatted to exFAT via the terminal).

Simple, easy, and.....it 'works'. And I now have a common data partition I can share between Puppy and ChromeOS-Flex for the latter to write to. (ChromeOS is quite happy reading from ext3/ext4, but when it comes to writing to them it pouts, stamps its little foot & refuses to 'play ball'......)

There are ways around everything.......and I find many solutions at StackExchange and AskUbuntu.

Mike.

[Jasper]

@mikewalsh

Thanks for sharing this

I did make a post earlier on the forum to see if it was possible to include this option when using 'Stickpup Usb Installer'.

This would be beneficial to users as you have realised it overcomes the 4GB limit.

[ChrisH]

@mikewalsh

Hi Mike, it's been a while but you know how it is, life bites.

Just today I wanted to use Gparted from Puppy to setup and reformat a 128Gb Sandisk Ultra flashdrive that I'd previously wiped. Of course I found the exFAT option greyed out. So far so just like you wrote.

A little Googling brought me to the forum (I knew it would) and your post. After a minute's reading I launched the PPM, typed in "exfat" and got ... nothing.

Just in case, I hit the search icon in the input line. That brought up exfat-utils and exfat-fuse but indicating that these are already installed. "exfatprogs" doesn't appear at all. So now I'm really puzzled because it clearly did for you back in May!

If you have any ideas what I may be doing wrong here I'd be grateful to read them.

In case it's any help, here's a quick summary of my system specs (though I can't why this will matter).

I'm running a frugal installation of Fossapup64 9.5, updated. It's installed on an internally mounted 500Gb SSD (ATA Samsung SSD 860). System hardware is an aging, Acer Aspire 5552 laptop running an AMD Athlon(tm) II P320 Dual-Core CPU @ 2.10GHz per core with 4Gb of RAM.

SSD is partitioned as follows:
1 x FAT32 @ 512Mib for the boot files,
1 x ext4 @ 14Gb for the Puppies, save folders and portables, etc.,
1 x ext4 using the remaining space (approx 450Gb) for my data.
No Swap

Best regards,

ChrisH

[dimkr]

Word of caution if you're using exFAT: currently Puppy only performs file system repair at boot only for ext[2-4] and it's been like this for a very long time.

No matter which Puppy you use, it probably doesn't repair the corruption non-journaled file systems like FAT32 or exFAT develop with time, even if you have pfix=fsck,fsckp.

If you save to an exFAT partition, make sure you run fsck on it every once in a while if you don't want to eventually lose your files, especially if your computer doesn't shut down cleanly from time to time.

(Or contribute support for doing this at boot time, see https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/w ... /init#L123).

[ChrisH]

Thanks for the steer @dimkr, I'll keep that in mind. As it happens I'm not intending to use the Flashdrive for a puppy installation. It's storage for my Android tablet. So I could just format it as FAT32, especially as I probably won't ever try and put a file on it that's bigger than the limit. But I hate being beaten by the system, so I'll continue banging my head on the wall for a while yet. Best regards, ChrisH

[bigpup]

Gparted support for exfat.

Just like any software, the version has an affect on what the software can do.

If you have the needed support software to work with exfat and Gparted is not offering option to format exfat.

Find out what version of Gparted you have.

I checked Gparted I have and it is version 1.5.0

It does allow formatting exfat.

In Gparted ->View ->File System Support
This will show a chart of what formats are supported and what can be done with them.
Not all options are available on all formats.
To be able to format it must have ability to create the specific format.
.

Screenshot(2).jpg (125.88 KiB) Viewed 227 times

[ChrisH]

@bigpup Many thanks for your response.

Of course you hit the nail right on the head. I have Gparted v1.0.0. I suspect that will be the version that's in the current Fossapup build. I have run the updater but that didn't change anything. I then got fixated on the slightly tangential question of why the PPM isn't showing an option to install exfatprogs. I presume that package definitely isn't installed on my system as far as I can see, by which I mean that the PPM isn't showing it as installed. It never occurred to me to cut to the chase and just try and update the Gparted package to a later version. So thanks for the steer. I'll pop off now and see if I can work out how to do that.

I'll be back in a while, once I've failed to do that, for further advice.

Best regards,

ChrisH

[ChrisH]

OK, so, after rooting around in the forum and Googling the question, I'm still now wiser about how to upgrade my Gparted package to a later version, able to format flashdrives to exFAT. That's a first. Usually there are more answers than I can deal with.

Nevertheless here's what I think I learned. I think I have three options.

Use the PPM to install exfatprogs from some source other than those available, which are not presenting the package for installation. But where would the source be and how would I get the PPM to point at it? And from what Mike says I'd still have to run it from a command line to do what I want.

Download and install a completey new version of Gparted that i could launch instead of the intstalled version. Perhaps this could be as an SFS package or one of Mike's portables? (Note to self. Go and check the list of portables immediately. ....... I'm back. Drew a blank there so back to the drawing board.)

Try a parallel installation of a later Puppy variant that might have a later version of Gparted.

So before I start working on the list, any final advice?

Best regards, ChrisH

[mikewalsh]

@ChrisH :-

Whilst I can see where you're coming from - yes, a 'standalone' modern build of gParted could be 'nice' for some use-cases, I guess - very few Puppy users are going to share your particular requirements here. Indeed, most will turn around & say, "Why don't you just install & run a newer Puppy"?

It's usually idiots like me who try to keep older, favourite Puppies running (by whatever means possible).......but even THAT, ultimately, has limitations. There's only so far you can take it.

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I've always run a large-ish 'kennels' constructed on a sliding scale. They cover the range of generations, dating all the way back to an old favourite of mine (Slacko 560) - which has been upgraded, modernized & modified to such an extent that even Micko himself would probably not recognise it as one of his creations anymore - and all the way up to and including Bookwormpup64.

I still regularly use Tahrpup64. I have a soft spot for the Tahrs, simply because they were the very first Pups that ran 100% perfectly on the hardware I was using a decade ago, OOTB. Xenialpup64 is one of my current 'daily drivers', sharing that honour with Bionicpup64 (which has printing 'issues'. I still need to get to the bottom of this).

Fossapup64 is coming along nicely to replace these two on a daily basis. Bookwormpup64, I'm still 'experimenting' with; I haven't even begun setting it up & customizing it yet; I don't like either PulseAudio OR Pipewire, even though these are clearly where Linux audio is at (and even PA is, I think, coming to the end of its long reign). Believe it or not, I'm still 'comfortable' with basic ALSA, and have built several personal utilities to work with it.

Alongside 'normal' installs of Tahrpup32 and Xenialpup32, I also have a pair of them set-up to use peebee's "64-bit on 32-bit" trick.......permitting use of modern, current 64-bit browsers inside an otherwise 'normal' 32-bit Puppy. I concur with @mikeslr on this one; although peebee built these for his Slackware-based series of Pups, the trick works very sweetly on both Xenial32 AND Tahr32.....but don't expect to take it any further back, because it will NOT work.

==========================

From the above, you can see I run a pretty varied kennels. As time passes, the newer builds come more & more fully into service; the oldest ones gradually see less and less use, and are eventually retired. For me, the Puppy 'sweet-spot' is between 4-6 yrs old.......a trait that most others will tell you is just asking for trouble; why the hell don't I do what everyone else does, and run the very newest all the time? It's never been my way; I'm one of these daft buggers that has a soft spot for older tech, and love seeing just what it's still capable of, even IF it's "not safe".

The above is NOT recommended by me, however. Just because it's what I like doing, I'm not recommending such behaviour to others; as in other tech ecosystems, newer stuff IS usually safer & more secure. I guess it all boils down to one thing, really; what level of paranoia are you comfortable with?

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As for a standalone gParted, it might be possible.....but it definitely would NOT be practical. Investigation shows that it needs a TON of dependencies; it would need a newer glibc and newer versions of a lot of other stuff, too.

Just sometimes, the command-line is the way to go. It does work for this, and it's NOT exactly hard to run it....

Mike.

[ChrisH]

@mikewalsh thanks very much for a thorough and interesting reply. I'm pretty much of the same view as you and I'm also a stubborn old beggar, so I'm right there with you.

To put it succinctly, I'll be perfectly happy to stick with Fossapup and do the two exFAT format jobs from the command line.

My problem, as I explained in my original reply on this thread, is that first I need to install exfatprogs from the PPM (as you write in your opening post) but it's just not available to me. You obviously think it should be but honestly, it isn't, and I've been unable to work out why. All my other options are just Heath Robinson work arounds for that problem.

Thanks again for your input, best regards, ChrisH

[Jasper]

@ChrisFH

As you are experiencing difficulties in downloading the application from the PPM.

I created a package which you try as an alternative.

exfatprogs-1.2.5-x86_64

https://www.mediafire.com/file/awn3j7zu ... 4.pet/file

Source & working examples:

https://github.com/exfatprogs/exfatprogs