I have Debian Lenny & MS Windows XP SP2 installed on different partitions of my hdd.

There are my partitions today:
device:    mount point:   fs type: options:
/dev/hda3  /              reiserfs (rw,notail)    // for Debian system
/dev/hda8 /home/ ext3 (rw,usrquota,grpquota) // for users' own files (user1/), shared files (docs, websites, music, films)
/dev/hda4  /usr/local/    ext3     (rw)
/dev/hda1  /mnt/win/      ntfs     (rw,nls=utf8)
/dev/hda5  /mnt/winhome/  ntfs     (rw,nls=utf8)
/dev/hda6  /mnt/buffer/   vfat     (rw)

I use /home/ partition for users' own files (on /home/anthony/, /home/galina/, /home/victor/ subdirectories) and shared files (docs, websites, music, films) on /home/pub/ subdirectory. Last can be potentially shared to other computers in the network using ftp/http/smb.

Regrettably, for some reasons, I need to use MS Windows sometimes. Moreover, some users of my computer don't like Unix.

For reliability, I put "My Documents" folders of MS Windows filesystem on a separate partition (mounted to /mnt/winhome/ on Debian). There is how I have done that: /dev/hda5 partition (/mnt/winhome/ in Debian) is mounted to "c:\home" in Windows. It has "c:\home\mydoc" subdir that has "anthony", "galina" & "victor" subdirs. "C:\Documents and Settings\anthony\My Documents" is a junction point (symlink) to "c:\home\mydoc\anthony", similarly for other users.

But it is very inconvenient (in multi-OS system) because:
1) I need to have 2 copies of files (on Linux & Windows home partitions).
2) I need to synchronize data between OSes.
3) Only root has access to /mnt/winhome/ partition (NTFS's native permissions aren't used under Debian).

I want to share /home/ partition between both OSes. For example, my projects will be in /home/anthony/projects/ dir which will be symlinked to "C:\Documents and Settings\anthony\My Documents\projects" folder. What is the most right way to do that?

[solution 1] /home/ partition is Ext3. All Ext3-drivers for Windows don't support access rights so that all files from /home/ partitions will be accessible to all users under Windows (or to administrators only). Moreover, such drivers don't support journaling and symlinks. Additionally I will need to use drive letters (such as c:, d:, e: etc.) but I hate them.

[solution 2] /home/ partition is NTFS. www.ntfs-3g.org says that ntfs-3g Linux read/write driver supports ownership/permissions under Linux (using mapping of users). Unfortunately (as I know) Debian-Installer doesn't support ntfs-partition mounting (to /home/). Additionally I will need to configure user mappings after D-I in order to access users' file by ordinary user). Also I'm afraid of law speed of this ntfs-3g driver. Do I need to install "ntfs-3g" package and change "ntfs" type to "ntfs-3g" in order to use this driver (my current driver also supports read/write)? What is www.linux-ntfs.org project and how it pertains to ntfs-3g?

What solution is better or are there any other good solutions?


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