HowTo: Enable NTFS read and write access on CentOS 6.2 / SL 6.2

Whether we like it or not sooner or latter an USB key or an USB HDD formatted with NTFS filesystem will make acquaintances with our systems. With than in mind, this post aims to explain the steps needed to enable read and write capabilities to a CentOS 6.2 and SL 6.2 systems though the same steps should be applicable to latter versions of the RHEL clones.

To be able to mount and access NTFS filesystems on a CentOS 6.2 or SL 6.2 desktop, the fuse-ntfs-3g and gnome-vfs2-ntfs packages have to be downloaded and installed from either the RPMforge or EPEL repository.

For this how to I'll be using the RPMforge, so let's start by adding the repository:

On a 32-bit system:
$ su 
# rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt 
# rpm -Uvh http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i686.rpm  

On a 64-bit system:
$ su 
# rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt 
# rpm -Uvh http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm 

After setting up the repository, proceed to install the required packages. It should be noted that ntfsprogs will also be installed as an dependency to gnome-vfs2-ntfs:
# yum install fuse-ntfs-3g gnome-vfs2-ntfs 
# hash 

fuse-ntfs-3g provides the opensource ntfs-3g driver that allows for full read-write access to NTFS, gnome-vfs2-ntfs allows GNOME VFS clients to use the NTFS library while ntfsprogs is a suite of NTFS utilities that includes ntsinfos (shows information on NTFS volumes), ntfslabel (show or sets NTFS volume labels) and nftsmount (mount read/write NTFS volumes) among others.

The NTFS volumes will appear in GNOME and double clicking them will mount them and make them browsable in Nautilus.