ABOUT TUXIDOW

             Tuxidow is  an explorer software ,  that can  read  the ext2 / ext3 ( Ext2 FS)  partitions from windows   NT/2000/XP One can read and copy files from the partitions through a  nice GUI.It does not perform any write operations on the filesystem, which remains as one of our future plans.

             This applications is checked on XP platform , and will most probably work on NT/2000 systems.   This will not work on    windows 95/98/Me  machines as the method of   diskIO

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Tuxidow   :      Tuxidow version 1.0

Tuxidow with source : Tuxidow_src_version 1.0

Tuxidow debug version   :      Tuxidow_debug

Development Phases

               It all started in 2004 ,July when we had to do our miniproject as part of our university studies.The main challenge that we faced was in performing disk io.(reading raw disk sectors from the hard disks).

Disk IO

               At first we developed this application in DOS where any kind of diskIO was easy enough using BIOS interrupts.We used the INT 13h extended read functions for reading the disk sectors.But we wanted to make it run under the 32 bit mode , and also provide a cool interface.We realized that inorder to achieve this in Win 95 based operating systems( windows 95/98/Me) , a thunking dll was necessary , and it wasn't easy for us to create one.

                In 2005 we ported the application to NT based systems , which provides a CreateFile access to the physical drives.CreateFile() enables to open the hard drives as an ordinary file and perform the IO in chunks of sectors.But this approach requires administrative privileges to perform the IO operations.

The Ext2 File System

                The first versions of Linux were based on Minix filesystem.As Linux matured , the Extended Filesystem (Ext FS) was introduced.  It included several significant extensions but offered unsatisfactory performance. The Second Extended Filesystem(Ext2) was introduced in 1994: besides including several new features , it is quite efficient and robust and has become one of the most widely used filesystems in Linux.

More information regarding the Ext2FS can be obtained from :

1. O'Reilly - Understanding The Linux Kernel  - The Ext2 Filesystem.

2. http://web.mit.edu/tytso/www/linux/ext2.html - The ext2 homepage.

3. http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/explore2fs/es2fs.htm -  Document about ext2fs from John Newbigin.

4. http://step.polymtl.ca/~ldd/ext2fs/ext2fs_toc.html

Source Code

                       The programming language that we used was C.All the GUI in the application was developed using the windows API functions  . We used Visual Studio .Net 2003 edition for compiling the code.

Download source code

            This program is a free software;you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of  the GNU General Public License as published by the free software foundation;either version 2 of the License , or (at your option) any later version.     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.