Both Linux and Mac OS X are Unix based so you'd think that it would be easy to format a removable drive so that both could easily use it. Not so. Never has the acronym "Gnu's Not Unix" been more apt.

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I have a couple of small removable drives that I use for transferring files from one computer to another. All the computers are Unix based so you'd think that the best format was something Unixy. Trawling the net, however, reveals that the simplest format to use is actually VFAT. This is a ridiculous solution.

Tiger offers various formats for a filesystem. There are various versions of HFS, there is VFAT, and there is something called the Unix File System. You'd think that this last one was the best, but Linux support for UFS is currently only partial: read-only. That's not good enough. It's support for the full HFSPlus format is also only partial: read-only. You can get a beta package to enable ext2 support in Mac OS X, but again it's not ideal.

The solution? Use HFSPlus but without journalling. Linux supports this fully. From reading around on the net there may be problems with large filesystems and large files, but my largest drive is 4Gb and that is well within the limits. Once I'd figured that out, the rest is easy as hotplug handles all the internals.

RESOURCES

• HOWTO on HFS+ from the Gentoo WIKI
• Mac OS X Filesystems