In Ubuntu 13.04 there was an option to use the PPA by Relan in order to get ExFat functionality. Seeing that in Ubuntu this functionality is now available from the repositories without the PPA I tried this but failed to make it work.
So my question is how do I enable exfat support?
Turns out the packages from the official repositories do the trick. Just install exfat-utils and exfat-fuse packages using the package manager of your choice, or just using apt-get from the command line:
sudo apt-get install exfat-utils exfat-fuse
This should delivery a working exfat file system (read and write support, but not formatting the drives with exfat via Gnome Disks and GParted).
From 13.04+ it hasn't been necessary but if you're using 12.04 you might need to reboot your computer before you can mount your exfat partition. If it isn't working for you after installing the packages, try rebooting.
I just did a successful install on 4/3/2014 with Ubuntu 13.10, fully updated, using only this command:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install exfat-utils
No restart required, and the drive auto-mounted with full read/write support.
fuse-utils moved to fuse. fuse-utils has been a trasitionary metapackage (something that just depends on the new package name) since 12.04.
That doesn't help you much if you have something that has a package dependency on fuse-utils because you're right, the metapackage has been removed now. The simplest thing to do might be to just download the Raring version and install that. It shouldn't hurt anything as it makes no demands on which version of fuse to install, just that there's one installed.
In Ubuntu 23.04, here's how to install support for the exFAT filesystem:
sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfatprogs
