Twelve years is a long project any way you look at it. That's the time it's taken to create a stable driver enabling full NTFS read/write support for linux.
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/index.html
Haven't tried it yet but plan to after installing Ubuntu Feisty Fawn in the near future. This Ubuntu release natively supports reading from NTFS partitions but getting it to write to NTFS will make my transition smoother. I did not fancy porting all my existing documents/data to FAT32 partitions, a file system that's friendly to both linux and WinXP. I plan to sit on the fence for some time while getting used to Ubuntu - multi-booting Win XP and Ubuntu via BootitNG - and this will make the time spent there all the more comfortable.
Ubuntu forums has a support thread where you can get help if you have trouble installing the ntfs-3g driver:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... 9&page=181
Support for writing to ntfs is planned to be included in Ubuntu but I'm not sure if it will make it to the next release, Gutsy Gibbon. Work on this project has commenced but it's been assigned a low priority.
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/gutsy/
