I recently decommissioned a Linux (<a href="/e-smith">e-smith</a>, to be exact) server at home. Its main job was to <a href="http://gallery.sf.net" title="The Gallery project is still the best way to work with large amounts of pictures if you really want to host them yourself">store pictures</a>, and now that I&#39;m using Flickr, there was no need to have it sitting in our living room.

But, there are a ton of pictures on there that still needed to be taken off. Gigs of pictures. Which are just generally a pain to transfer over the network.

I have an external Firewire enclosure for IDE hard drives, so I thought I would experiment in trying to get the Linux file system (EXT2) mounted on Mac OS X. Long story short, after much Googling, I found <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/">ext2fsx</a>. Like many Mac applications, it &quot;just worked&quot; and is really user friendly.

<img align="left" alt="ext2fsx System Pref Icon" src="/sites/bmannconsulting.com/files/syspref_extfsx.jpg" />

After you install the package, it adds a cute little icon to the &quot;Other&quot; section of your System Preferences. That&#39;s it. That&#39;s pretty much all you need to know to get Linux disks mounting on OS X.

All the command line tools are installed as well, and I did actually have to run the <code>fsck</code> command to fix some problems with the drive I had, but generally you just need to hit one of the three buttons in the control panel:

<img alt="ext2fsx Control Panel" src="/sites/bmannconsulting.com/files/ext2fsx_cp.jpg" />

So, highly recommended!

Note: ext3 is a journaled version of ext2, and this utility works fine with that as well.