I want to share user file between windows and linux. Is it a good idea to use an NTFS partition for /home? I suppose this question really breaks into many part, such as how mature is write support for NTFS (as of now, compiled in my 2.6.10) and does chmod works in NTFS? My memory with a FAT32 partition is that, chmod / chown doesn't seems to do much between remounts (i.e. owner ship setting is lost after remount)

I am currently mounting with the following line:
/dev/hda9 /home_test noauto,noatime,rw,nls=utf8,umask=000 0 0

This seems to work okay as far as I know, but being a place for semi-important (personal, not system important) data, I really want to know some expert opinion.

Cheers.

I thought write support for NTFS is still in the staage where you can only overwrite files that have the same length. So I don't think a /home folder on NTFS is either smart or possible.

The ownership and permission rights for Linux-mounted Windows partitions are set via the umask option. That means that the chmod or chown commands are useless.

I agree with marghorp that even with full write support on ntfs (like the captive driver offers), it is not a good idea and most probably will not work correctly.

In the above example, you are talking about the FAT32 partition, right? Otherwise I would really be interested how you managed to write on NTFS. You didn't even specify the filesystem in your fstab line.

NTFS writing is not well supported in Linux thats why most distros disable it by default. You can however create a seperate fat32 partition and then put the files you need to share on that partition. I am sure windoze will be able to detect the fat32 partition.

Yes. Pardon my lack of knowledge about NTFS. I agree with the above comments after experimenting myself. For fat32 partition, does anything like chmod and chown work?

I am more interested in learning the current status of NTFS-write. Any good link for that? Or just perhaps someone describe it shortly in a reply? Thank yoU!

FAT32 has no support for the Unix notion of user and group permissions, so ownership and permissions are set for the whole partition at mount time. uid, gid, dmask and fmask are useful mount options.

The NTFS projects current homepage is:

http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/

Eric

I wouldn't try writing to ntfs...especially if that's where your windows installation is. I make fat partitions to share between linux and windows.