Daily Archives: 10 May 2016


Fedora 23: Support exfat

The Background:

Recently we got our hands on a GoPro Hero4 Black camera and we used a 64GB memory card as storage. The file system on the card is exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table), which is a Microsoft file system designed for flash drives. It is proprietary and Microsoft owns patents on several elements of its design. exFAT has been adopted by the SD Card Association as the default file system for SDXC cards larger than 32GiB.

The issue:

Fedora does not support exFat due to the licensing issues that Microsoft applied to the product and thus we could not mount the card on our machine.

The solution:

We installed the fuse-exfat driver from rpmfusion.org using the following commands.

#Enable access to both the free and the nonfree repository
#free repository: for Open Source Software (as defined by the Fedora Licensing Guidelines) which the Fedora project cannot ship due to other reasons
#nonfree repository: for redistributable software that is not Open Source Software (as defined by the Fedora Licensing Guidelines); this includes software with publicly available source-code that has "no commercial use"-like restrictions 
su -c 'dnf install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm';

#Perform the installation
sudo dnf install fuse-exfat;

More background:

RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn’t want to ship. That software is provided as precompiled RPMs for all current Fedora versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6.