I respect Harry's tendency to be conservative, after all he has hosed 3 disks in 3 years.

However I have personal, recent and frequent experience of writing to NTFS with Knoppix, using the latest tools from the Linux-NTFS project (see: http://www.linux-ntfs.org/ and particularly the references to ntfs-3g, which is the latest tool). Note that this is not included with Knoppix and you have to install it yourself.

I have posted some of my results of testing ntfs-3g on this forum. What I can say from my experiments and stress-testing of Linux writing to NTFS is that significant progress has been made in the last few months, but I consider it a bleeding edge experimental capability. I have not encountered major problems, and neither have the many others who have been testing ntfs-3g. But that does not mean problems won't arise. There are risks and unknown unknowns, so only do it if you are keen to be part of the community of users willing to experiment and take risks in order to help the Linux-NTFS developers push the frontiers.

Having said all that, I must also say that, given the description of your usage scenario (copying a few files back and forth), Harry's advice and suggested method is correct and the best one for your needs. There's no need to add additional risks and complexities to these simple tasks.

If however you are still interested in experimenting and testing with NTFS, let me know and I'll give you more details.