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MacFUSE file system is not available Error

I try to keep up with the latest Windows and macOSs by participating in the Windows Insider Preview program and the Apple Developer Program. I run both of these OSs on a Macbook Pro Retina (mid-2012). As of today, that is Windows 10 Build 16232.1000 and macOS 10.13 beta 2 (17A291m).

A lot of the time, things don’t work because I am running beta OSs with released apps.

One of the recent problems I encountered with macOS High Sierra (17A291j) was a kernel panic when I was using Paragon NTFS for Mac 15 with Dropbox (v30.3.14). I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but my Dropbox directory for both Windows and Mac is the same directory on an NTFS volume. Every time I started Dropbox, I would get a kernel panic. I opened a support ticket with Paragon Software and a few days later they sent me a new version that had the same problem.

For interoperability between the two OSs, read/write capability really helps. In the macOS (High Sierra), NTFS read/write capability is not native. I was very happy with Paragon NTFS for Mac 15 until I started getting kernel panics. On the Windows side, I haven’t found something that will read the Apple File System (APFS) in macOS 10.13.

With earlier versions of MacOS, I had used the open source NTFS-3g. When Paragon NTFS for Mac 15 stopped working in my situation with Dropbox, I decided to try the commercial version of Tuxera’s NTFS for Mac. This seemed to work ok until I installed the macOS High Sierra Developer Beta 2 Update 1 (17A291m).

On booting macOS, I would get the error message:

Aligned I/O enabled.
CBCIO enabled.
/System/Library/Filesystems/fusefs_txantfs.fs//Support/10.9/tufs/tufsfs.kext failed to load -… check the system/kernel logs for errors or try kextutil(8).
the MacFUSE file system is not available (71)

I traced this error to Gatekeeper in macOS 10.13. After I allowed the software, Tuxera NTFS for Mac started working again.

macOS System Preferences
Allow software from Tuxera in macOS System Preferences Security & Privacy Settings

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Windows Server 2012 on a Macbook

Server Manager, Windows Server 2012After the failure of an old computer running Windows Server 2003, I setup Windows Server 2012 on a Macbook.

Years ago, I set up a Sony Vaio PCG-Z505HS running Windows Server 2003 at home so I could keep up with Macs and Active Directory. When I recently experienced problems with DHCP and DNS, I discovered that the Vaio had died. There was no LED power indication. My troubleshooting consisted of jiggling the power connector and checking the power supply voltage. When I measured voltage from the AC adaptor, I gave up, using the rationale that it had lived its useful life. The Vaio, with a Pentium 3, 500 MHz CPU, was introduced in January 2000.

Coincidentally, I had a hardware failure in my Macbook (late 2006), so I decided to repurpose it as a domain server using an evaluation version of Windows Server 2012.

The Windows Server 2012 installation was simple using the Server with a GUI mode installation. The Server Manager and configuration tools greatly simplify the setup. With Windows Server 2012 on a Macbook running silicon introduced in 2006 – an Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T7200 that has Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x), the next step is to try virtualization. As a Macbook running OS X, I successfully ran VMware Fusion VMs running Ubuntu and Windows 2000, though I forsee the 3 GB of RAM in the current system will be a limiting factor.

The best part about running an Active Directory domain at home is joining computeres to the domain. The welcome message says, “Welcome to the lower_slobbovia domain.

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Windows 8 on a Macbook

Microsoft Windows 8 Release Preview on Apple Macbook (Late 2006)

I installed the Microsoft Windows 8 Release Preview (x64) on my Apple Macbook (Late 2006). Over the years I’ve upgraded my Macbook’s hardware – it now has 3 GB RAM, a 120 GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD and a 320 GB Western Digital WD3200BEKT hard disk. I use rEFIt as the boot manager for the two main operating systems that I use, Windows 7 and OS X Lion.

I ran the Windows 8 setup program from an external DVD drive while booted to Windows 7 and the installation took about 25 minutes. Everything worked pretty well except the audio. I could see by the red glow coming from the audio jack that it had to defaulted to the SPDIF (digital) output. I installed the Bootcamp 4.0 IDT Sigmatel audio drivers and the analog sound output started working.

Thanks to Paul Thurrott for the instructions on setting up Windows Media Center, I was able to get the TV tuner working after I installed the Silicon Dust HDHomeRun TV tuner Windows drivers.

Once I got the dual monitor setup working and installed Google Chrome, I realized that Windows 8 is pretty much like Windows 7, except for the Metro interface. It seems that Microsoft’s goal with Windows 8 is to simplify Windows with Metro. The side effect of this is hiding everything that is of use to the power user – which made the learning curve going from Windows 7 to 8 slightly steeper. Fortunately, switching between Metro and the desktop interface is simple. The main problem with the Metro interface for me (besides that you can only see one running app at a time) is that I would never use the apps that are tiled on the main screen.

When I realized it would take me a week to install everything else to get to the equivalent of the working system I had on Windows 7, I did an image restore back to Windows 7.

I’m not so down on Windows 8 now that I’ve used it for a while. Microsoft has made improvements in Windows 8 that are helpful to the power user – Windows Explorer – now called File Explorer – is much more robust, for example. Windows 8 even runs fairly quickly on my 5.5 year old hardware and it only took about 30 seconds to boot. So while it looks like Windows 8 will run well on this legacy system, unfortunately Apple won’t be supporting my MacBook (Late 2006) with it’s next OS, Mountain Lion.