I have a collection of both Mac OS X and Linux servers dotted around the place… Sometimes I need to read ext4 formatted drives on my Mac’s… this always proves an annoying problem where I have to mount them inside a Virtual Machine and copy things across…. Pain and Slow!

I searched the interweb for a solution to this… and most  guides are about 3 years out of date, so here’s one from 2013 that works on Lion / Mountain Lion and even Mavericks DP1/2.

Download and Install : OSXFUSE-2.5.4.dmg (this took off where MacFuse left off and even has compatibility for old MacFuse plugins).

Download and Install : fuse-ext2-0.0.7.dmg

Plug in your ext fs formatted drive… Voila! I wouldn’t rely on this in a production environment mind you… but its decent if you just need to grab some files from a USB drive quickly for example.