I’ve been waiting for a good writeable NTFS file system. I used Captive-NTFS but wasn’t really happy with it. Lots of errors when I used it last in July – August 2006 (if I remember the timeline correctly). Now we have a great writeable NTFS file system for Linux called NTFS-3g.

On my Kubuntu machine, I installed it as:
sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
I also installed ntfsprogs available from http://packages.debian.org/unstable/otherosfs/ntfsprogs for my Kubuntu machine. The use for the NTFS-Progs is that you can use utils like ntfs fix if your mounted NTFS is tainted. If you do not have a latest version installed of ntfs-progs you might run into issues where ntfsfix might not work. Use the latest version from the above link. You might need to install libntfs9 from the debian package as
dpkg -i libntfs9_1.13.1-6+b2_i386.deb
Now I was getting tired of having to unount my NTFS partitions first and then re-mount them in ntfs-3g mode to make them writeable. So I installed ntfs-config and also the patched pmount debian package. Then all you have to do is run ntfs-config and choose the option that suits you best.
Now all my USB drives that have NTFS on it mount in read/write mode!