Installation
The Ubuntu repository does not come with any package that supports exFAT. To enable access to exFAT, we need to install from a third-party PPA. In your terminal,
Usage
Once you have installed the exfat-utils packages, whenever you plug in your exFAT external drive. It will be detected by the system and automount. It comes with read/write access so you can copy to and paste from the drive. In the event that your system doesn’t automount the external drive, here is what you can do to mount it manually: Replace the “/dev/sdb1” with the exact file path to your external hard drive. To unmount the exFAT external drive:
Why isnt’t exFAT supported natively in Linux?
The main reason why exFAT is not supported natively in Linux is because exFAT is developed by Microsoft and it comes with a restrictive license, which doesn’t allow free or open-source operating system to implement it natively. Even though the exfat-utils package allows you to read/write to a exFAT file system, you can’t format your external hard disk to exFAT format yet. To format to exFAT file system, the only (and easiest) way now is via Windows. If you are running a Windows virtual machine, you can do so in the VM as well.
