Finding a suitable filesystem

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
I am wondering what filesystem is best for a USB memory stick. The
problem is that fat/fat32 is very poor on the permissions, but most
systems can read/write it, whereas ntfs is poorly supported under Linux
(and I am not certain about how good the permission support is) and
things like ext3, reiserfs and other unix FSs aren't supported on
windows. So is there mount options for fat/fat32 which improves the case
somewhat under Linux, or might ntfs be a good compromise as most of the
Linux systems I will be using it on will be mine so I can install
ntfs-3g or other drivers (and windows 9x seems to have disappeared
sufficiently that I won't have too many of those), or is there a windows
driver for one of the unix filesystems (and if I want to be able to use
it on more than just my machine I suppose I could make a small fat32
partition where I could have the driver available should a windows
machine not have it).

Thanks for any pointers to information or advice people can give.

From
Michael Whapples