I haven't gotten my external drive over to linux yet (re the post I made less than half an hour ago) but I was wondering about the following:

When I put files on an external drive under a windows or macintosh OS, I can then connect the drive to another computer and access those drives a-ok. What happens if I try to do this with Linux? Files and folders have permissions in Linux (normally a good first order protection against malicious acts) so when I go over to the new computer, do I get to access the files? Do I have to make them globally viewable first? And if I do that, am I not just opening up my drive to hackers? Because I'm certainly not going to chmod when I want to use it here and then chmod when I put it back. Also, what if I have the same username on both computers. Does this confuse Linux? I would like to think that it doesn't because it would make cracking ez if you were to get your hands on someone's physical drive.

Anyway, to distill my question from that: Can ext drives be swapped in linux as they are in PC?

Thanks,

I do something like that. The file permissions are controlled by UID and GID numbers so the usernames don't matter so long as the UID and GID numbers match.