It seems that Fuse is compiled into the Ubuntu kernel by default.
To test you can use sshfs:
sudo apt-get install sshfs
mkdir tmp
sshfs localhost:/tmp ./tmp
ls tmp
To compile a fuse filesystem that doesn't have a package:
sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev
and then follow the build instructions for your filesystem.
FUSEcompress implements transparent file compression as a FUSE filesystem.
sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev
svn checkout http://fusecompress.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ fusecompress-read-only
cd fusecompress-read-only
./autogen
./configure
sudo ./make install
To mount a compressed filesystem, use the fusecompress command:
mkdir fusecompress-storage fusecompress
fusecompress -c gz ./fusecompress-storage ./fusecompress
bash -c 'for i in $(seq 1 100); do echo "this is a test" >> test.txt; done'
cp test.txt fusecompress
ls -la ./fusecompress/test.txt ./fusecompress-storage/test.txt
However, I found that this file system doesn't work well with unix pipes:
mkdir -p fuse-test/fusecompress-storage fuse-test/fusecompress
fusecompress fuse-test/fusecompress-storage fuse-test/fusecompress
bash -c 'for i in $(seq 1 100); do echo "this is a test" >> fuse-test/fusecompress/test.txt; done'
ls -la fuse-test/fusecompress-storage/test.txt fuse-test/fusecompress/test.txt
Notice that the test.txt in fusecompress-storage is not compressed. But this will trigger a compression:
cp fuse-test/fusecompress/test.txt fuse-test/fusecompress/copy.txt
ls -la fuse-test/fusecompress-storage/copy.txt fuse-test/fusecompress/copy.txt