This is big news for desktop Linux users who dual boot between Windows and Linux. It also means that users of external hard drives will no longer have to deal with the artificial 32GB size limit on FAT32 formatted drives.
Linux users have had the long ability to read NTFS partitions using Linux-NTFS, but writing to it was an issue. A not-so-legal solution existed named Captive NTFS, that requires users to use the original NTFS.SYS file to read and write data from a NTFS volume.
The Linux-NTFS team have now created a promising new solution for using NTFS formatted drives in Linux. Linux users will have reliable ability to both read and write reliably to Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, using this new driver that is currently in beta.
APC Magazine has tested stability and speed of the new driver that is named
NTFS-3g and found it works good. read more at the APC mag website,
http://www.apcstart.com/site/amills/2006/08/870/linux-to-get-reliable-ntfs-write-support