[S-99]

Linux distros quite commonly use ext3 as the filesystem for the partition you install linux on. There is ext4 that's out now, i'm eager to use it when it becomes more mainstream. Ext3 is just ext2 filesystem with journaling and a few other enhancements. bsd on the other hand uses ufs for the os filesystem. Pretty much you can format partitions to anything with linux if you a powerful app like qtparted. I frequently use qtparted to format hard drives repartition and give filesystems because it does it very fast compared to windows doing it.

Reiserfs is pretty much a competitor for ext3. Reiserfs was the first journaling filesystem for linux, and is used by several distros to be the file system that linux will be installed on. Reiserfs is faster than ext3, but reiserfs has several criticisms that ext3 doesn't have (reiserfs has some synchronizing problems, and i really don't know if those were minor or not, program corruption will only tell). If you're interested in reiserfs, i'd wait till the new resierfs comes out before going to it.

[jr2]

... ever hear of GNU Parted?  What do you think of it?  IIRC, among many other things, it has the capability of resizing NTFS partitions (which is why I use it).

[S-99]

You can do resizing with qtparted also, but i don't think qtparted is too good at resizing partitions with fragmented ntfs filesystems. Even after you defragment the ntfs partition such as a windows partition, windows likes to space itself out over a partition. Qtparted i'm thinking doesn't like to move data if that's involved in resizing a partition. If all of the data is at the beginning quadrant of the partition then you can resize with qtparted smoothly, but if you can't get that moved to the beginning half of the drive at least, qtparted wont do it.
I assume gnu parted is a port of qtparted sort of like gparted is for gnome, but i could be wrong. Either the ntfs partition you were resizing had lucky enough to have no data at the end of the partition so you could resize it. Resizing windows partitions blows balls depending on whether or not where the data is in certain regions of the partition. Or it goes good if you a have a resizer that will move the data before it resizes.

EDIT: actually gparted is based off of gnuparted, qtparted apparently has nothing to do with gnuparted which is what i was getting at anyway, except for the gparted being a port of qtparted which was incorrect.

[jr2]

I guess I didn't use GNU parted to resize NTFS... now I wonder what I did use.  But, it does have the capability of resizing FAT32, FAT16, and other partitions without defragging... which is prolly what I was doing (resizing a FAT32).  http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/manual/html_node/resize.html#resize

EDIT: That's right, I used the built-in partition manager for Mandrake (now Mandriva) 10.1

[S-99]

Redhat...bleh Although fedora is a great redhat distribution, mandriva is a great choice and has high popularity, it's also useful all and such. I like debian because that's what i started using and it's commands i was already familiar with, such as apt-get. But even still, i hardly use console, and as far as apt-get goes i'm still using synaptic I really don't use much of console unless i have to compile a driver. Besides that redhat is a good to use, i really like how linux made strides and competition to be the next desktop os without needing to use console commands. Like i said, console has gotten to the point you really only need it for compiling source code, and that's even if you need to do that. compiling drivers is all i got to. After that console is necessary for wine (of which idk how to run, there doesn't seem to be a solid walkthrough of it anywhere). That's why i'm still using winxp, as soon as i go 100% linux just means i have a 100$ os for sale (winxp).
But, yeah, resizing sucks sometimes, if i have to resize something i don't bother wasting my time to find out if i can simply resize. I just backup, repartition, and restore backups to resized partitions. It's a little crude and possibly unnecessary, but i hate resizing soley on the idea that windows partitions rarely have smooth resizing. Not to mention other partitions which god know where they decided to place their data. Resizing will get better in the future, it's just not quite good enough yet from my view.

[jr2]

...heh, and if that wasn't bad enough, then you have the ultra hidden system partitions where the recovery CDs are now kept to keep costs down... that crashed one of my installs once... thankfully, I just restored things the way they were and didn't have to re-format... or maybe I did, I can't remember...