What FS to use?

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I have an external HDD, which I plan to use between my Mac and PC. I know FAT32 can be used between any current OS. On my PC, I have a dual-boot between Windows and Linux.

Now, my question is: Is there any filesystem I can format my drive to be so that it can be read and written, without the limits of FAT32, between Mac and Linux?
 
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MacBook 2.0GHz White, 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD
What particular limits are you concerned about? The only problem I can think of is that it doesn't support Unix style permissions, but if you're sharing the drive between machines those permissions will be nonsense on one or the other anyway.
 
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Unfortunatly, FAT32 is the only file system that seems to be common to all three OS'. If you are willing to spend a little money for a PC app like MacOpener (and there are others) that will let you read and write Apple HFS+ disk format, then this may be the best. Many Linux distros support this via kernel module hfsplus. I know for a fact that the recent SuSE releases (9.3 and forward) support this module, as does Ubuntu (at least Dapper Drake, the first Ubuntu release I have tried). If you buy MacOpener or its ilk, you now have all of Windows, Linux and of course Mac that can read and write the external hard drive.

As an alternate, you can do what I do, which is use HFS+ on the external drive, hence both Mac and Linux can read and write, while maintaining full user and permission information. To add Windows to this set, I use Linux as a go between. Like you, I have Linux dual booted on my Windows box. I keep a shared ext2 partition that both Linux and Windows can read and write (ext2 support all the user and permission information, and Windows just ignores it) and keep any stuff that needs regular transfer amongst all three environments on that partition. Works well.
 
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There is one other thing you can do, if file transfer between the three environments is what you are really after. I have put this in a separate post because it is a separate idea, and not really a solution to the specific problem you mentioned.

You can use Windows file sharing on your Mac. This allows the Mac and the Windows box to see each other and transfer files over your network. Linux adds in via Samba, or smbfs (if your Linux distro supports this - Ubuntu does). This lets all three computers see each other and freely transfer files. It will likely take a little dickering around on your Linux distro to get Samba up and running (took me an hour or so). For the Mac, it is as simple as checking the Windows File Sharing tick box in the Sharing Preferences panel.

So, if you are just looking to transfer files around, and were using the external hard drive as the mechanism, you may wish to consider Windows file sharing and Samba/smbfs.
 
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The limits for FAT32 I mean are the maximum limit of a 32GB partition, and maximum file sizes of 4GB. From how you descirbe it, HFS sounds like a good idea (If Fedora's kernel doesn't have it by default it'd be easy to add on).

One question though: How were you able to get Windows to read EXT2? Is it one of the ones that it can read by default, or would I have to install something extra?
 
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There is an installable file system for ext2 for Windows. It seems to work quite seamlessly, although there were a few caveats re its use on external hard drives. See http://www.fs-driver.org/
 

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