[SOLVED] Installing older packages and blocking upgrades

[aria]

Hello, need support on how to replace packages in 24.04 with older versions (from 18.04), and block their upgrade.
Precisely, I wish to replace:

• ntfs-3g 1:2022.10.3-1.2 ubuntu3 (comming with 24.04)

with an older version:

• ntfs-3g 1:2017.3.23-2 ubuntu18.04.2

And also:

• how to block its upgrade.

Finally, if what I need it to do (writing colons to ntfs partitions on external drives) won't work:

• how to reverse these changes.

Thanks.

[oshunluvr]

OK, Here's how to break your installation:

1. Remove ntfs-3g from 24.04
2. Download the ntfs-3g package from 18.04 and all it's dependencies
3. Attempt to install them
4. Download more old packages to try and make the other old packages work
5. Repeat the last two steps over and over until eventually the install completely breaks
6. Reverse the changes by deleting the entire install and starting over

From Microsoft documentation re. NTFS file naming conventions:

Use any character in the current code page for a name, including Unicode characters and characters in the extended character set
(128–255), except for the following reserved characters:

< (less than)
> (greater than)
: (colon)
" (double quote)
/ (forward slash)
\ (backslash)
| (vertical bar or pipe)
? (question mark)
* (asterisk)

Your realistic choices are:

• Stop using NTFS all together. It's a horrible file system anyway so why use it? And especially NO ONE should be using NTFS on a removable device.
• Assuming that 18.04 allows colons, install 18.04 and stop trying to use anything newer. Or install 18.04 to a virtual machine and use it for whatever task you're working on.
• Change whatever it is that your doing that for some reason demands colons.

IMO anything else is a fools errand.

Look, I'm not trying to be rude, but you keep starting new threads on the same topic and honestly, it's not going to go anywhere. But I wish you good luck.

[aria]

Thanks,
I won't explain again and again why I have to still use some drives formatted to ntfs. It is not a choice. Just like with newer ntfs-3g, where there's no choice to make them write that special characters. But I tried to narrow the issue, and yes, it narrowed to this: newer vs. older ntfs-3g. Unfortunately I'm null in coding, like I am in German and in reading musical scores, but I cannot help to use other OS' but Linux, and this for the last 15 years already, like I cannot listen to any other opera but Wagner's.
I write very seldom here, but where could I search for support with what I'm unable to do or to learn?
Narrowed this issue, and now I'm done with it. Will buy a larger SSD, and will install alongside 24.04 and 18.04, and will use for current tasks the newest, but to copy to ntfs with the older (if special characters are present).
PS: I'd continue to use exclusively 18.04, as I did until now (because I disliked 20&22.04), but applications are old, can become dysfunctional soon (had this issue several years ago with KDE-Connect, but solved it here), and there are no more upgrades for it. But exactly the lake of upgrades, is a plus if needing to copy files and folders with special characters to ntfs drives.
Problem solved, thread closed.

[oshunluvr]

OK, Here's an odd thing: I do have an older 2TB SSD drive in a USB enclosure and it's formatted with NTFS because I traveled and serviced 300+ Window systems. I had some very large files and ExFat wasn't a thing yet (these were old Win 7 computers) so I used NTFS.

Just today I decided to clean off this drive and re-purpose it as I retired last year. After I deleted 99% of the files and moved a few others to some other storage, I checked the drive file system and it reports "ntfs3" to my KDEneon install. I thought about your problem and decided to test it.

The results: I was able to create three files using a colon in the name: test:, test:test, and test:test:test

stuart@office:/media/stuart/ineo$ touch text:
stuart@office:/media/stuart/ineo$ touch test:test
stuart@office:/media/stuart/ineo$ touch test:test:test​

That is very curious. I took the liberty of listing all installed packages relating to ntfs on my system:

stuart@office:~$ dpkg -l |grep -i ntfs
ii  libntfs-3g89t64:amd64                         1:2022.10.3-1.2ubuntu3                                       amd64        read/write NTFS driver for FUSE (runtime library)
ii  ntfs-3g                                       1:2022.10.3-1.2ubuntu3                                       amd64        read/write NTFS driver for FUSE​

I can't understand why you're having a problem and I'm not.

[oshunluvr]

My mount options:

/dev/sde1 on /media/stuart/ineo type ntfs3 (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,uhelper=udisks2)

I just mounted it with Dolphin by inserting it and clicking on it.