Hello.

I was just wondering what would be the most appropriate format for a Linux partition. One of my friends originally put Linux on my computer and he used ext3. However, I know that he didn't know much about Linux at the time and I still don't. I've seen many thing suggesting ext2. I'm trying out somethings right now and in particular I would like a recommendation for the partition format that should be used for Kubuntu, Slackware, and JAD. Just letting me know which format would be great, but if you want to throw in why it'd be the appropriate choice as well, that would be awesome. Thanks for your time.

Ext2 is the older format (not journaled). Ext3 is newer (journaled). It keeps a journal of the state of the filesystem so that if power is interrupted, on reboot, the system can recover the journal (and the state of the filesystem) and easily repair any data corruption that may have occured as a result of the loss of power.

Other journaled filesystems are ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS.

You should be alright using either ext3 or reiserfs. People have different preferences, but you should be fine using one or both of the filesystems I mentioned. I would personally avoid ext2 because it lacks any journalling capabilities, so if you had a power cut or the system did not shutdown cleanly you could have problems.