I was wondering if somebody could explain to me how filesystems work and which filesystem is the best. I have seen the following filesystems: ext2,ext3,ReiserFS(or something like that), NTFS, and FAT32. I know Linux cannot install on NTFS and cannot write to NTFS because it is dangerous. I know FAT32 is what Win98 uses, but thats pretty much all I know.

Thanks,
Sean

I have had experience only with ext3, reiser, and today I reformatted my laptop hd and created an XFS partition. I must say, that both reiser and ext3 are very stable, but reiser is a bit faster than ext3, but if the PC crashes, reiser needs more time for the recovery than ext3.
FAT is an old DOS filesystem, which doesn't support UNIX file attributes. It is good for floppies and other external storage devices, because such devices can be accessed by both Windows and Linux, but you can't execute linux binary straightof it, because it doesn't support execute attribute.
There have been already many benchmarks and reviews about different file systems written, I advise you to use google. A good start point is also here:

http://www.linux-sec.net/FileSystem/

my

Filesystem differences are pretty esoteric for the normal user. Ext is no longer supported. Ext2 is thoroughly tested and pretty solid, but not high-performance and lacks journalling. Ext3 bolts journalling onto ext2 and a lot of people use it. Reiserfs is a more modern system - some people complain of instability and data-loss but it works great for me - primarily intended to be used for filesystems with a lot of small files. JFS and XFS are IBM and SGI filesystems (I think) which are akin to Reiser in some senses. They're less frequently used for Linux boxes but are generally available. XFS is supposed to be very high performance.

FAT is lame. FAT32 is a little better. NTFS is a real filesystem but it is a real pain for interoperating with Linux. Those are all MS filesystems, right.

I think most Linux users use reiser or ext3 and, if they dual-boot, they may often use NTFS but many use FAT32 to have an easier time of it.

There is no best, really. NTFS, and all Linux filesystems beyond ext2 are good - tend to be targetted for different functions. So there might be a 'best for' but no 'best'.

As far as how they work in detail, I dunno. Check out namesys(.com? .org?) and you can read up on reiserfs - other sites for others.

FAT32 - Old filesystem. Unless you really want Windows and Linux on the same partition, there's no point in installing to this filesystem. It has a variety of problems and it's probably safe to say Microsoft kept it in use for much longer than they should have.

NTFS - You are correct, Linux cannot be installed to this, as writing to it from Linux is considered dangerous. I've heard there are tools for doing it relatively safely these days, though. At least it's an improvement over FAT32.

ext2 - Another old filesystem, but it's not bad. You have to be careful with it. I remember a while back having to cut power to my machine because Mandrake hard locked on me. I tried to reboot and found that the filesystem was corrupted, so I reformatted. Thinking back on it, it was probably fixable, but I didn't know anything about that at the time.

ext3 - This is a journalized version of ext2. Basically, it's more forgiving than ext2. You also don't have to fsck it every time the system goes down hard. A good thing about ext3 is that if you're running an ext2 filesystem, you can add the journal to it, basically converting it to ext3, without losing data. One catch of using a journaling filesystem is that the journal takes up some space, making it unsuitable for small partitions(in the area of tens of megabytes), like a boot partition, or floppy disks. To minimize risk, people with a seperate boot partition typically make it umount as soon as the system is up and running.

ReiserFS - This is another journaling filesystem. It's younger than ext2 and I think ext3 as well, but it caught on quick. Many desktop users run this filesystem, myself included. http://www.namesys.com/

Here's a Linux Magazine artical about ext3 and journaling filesystems. It's on page 3, which talks about journaling filesystem, just go back to page one if you want to read the whole thing.
http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-08/journaling_03.html