Kio-mac is a kioslave for reading MacOS HFS+ partitions. A kioslave is just a library used by KDE to access files, it means you can access files from your local hard disk, ftp and MacOS in much the same way, through Konqueror or any KDE file dialogue. HFS+ is the disk format used in Mac system 8.1 and newer (MacOS X also lets you use UFS but HFS+ is the default).
Installing
To install kio-mac you'll first need kfsplus utils which kio-mac is built upon. Debian users need just apt-get install hfsplus/testing (or unstable). Otherwise you can get the RPMs I made from the Debian packages, see the bottom of the article for the link.
Now you can install kio-mac. Debian dpkg and SuSE RPMs are available, there's also the source.
Of course you'll also need KDE.
Configuring
You need to know where your MacOS hfs+ partition is. It'll be something like /dev/hda5. If you don't know run mac-fdisk as root and type p for print and look for Apple_HFS. Type q to quit.
Now make sure you can read that partition as your normal user. Try ls -l /dev/hda5 where hda5 is your partition. On Debian I get brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 5 Nov 22 2000 /dev/hda5 Which means it can be read by users in the group `disk'. I would then add my username to the end of the line in /etc/group and possibly log out and in again to be able to access the disk.
Using
To use kio-mac just type mac:/?dev=/dev/hda5 into Konqueror. If it doesn't work make sure you have the correct partition and that you have read access to that partition. Kio-mac remembers which partition you use so you don't have to keep entering it.
HFS+ actually keeps two files for every one you see (called forks), a resource fork and a data fork. The default copy mode when you're copying files across to you native drive is raw data which means it just copies the data. Text files are copied in text mode (same as raw format but changes the line endings to be Unix friendly and gets rid of some funny extra characters - strongly advised for text files) unless you specify otherwise. You can also copy the files across in Mac Binary II format or specify text or raw format with another query: mac:/myfile?mode=b or mac:/myfile?mode=t. See man hpcopy for more.
Notes
File types are done with matching the HFS+ type and application label and then by extentions. See the source for the exact matching that happens and feel free to suggest improvements.
For some reason some directories in MacOS end in a funny tall f character. This seems to confuse hfsplus utils and these directories can't be read.
You can't easiily use the command line tools while you are browsing using kio-mac in Konqueror. Konqueror continuously refreshes it's view which means hpmount is being called every few seconds. Click on Konqueror's home button before using the tools yourself on the command line.
Copyleft 28 January 2002
Resources
- (see for the latest version.
- Debian users need just apt-get install hfsplus/testing
