Interesting... still further! I'm reading the "beginning Ubuntu Linux
- from novice to professional" by Keir Thomas. P234 there is a note:
"You can only read from NTFS drives under linux because writing to
them is considered too risky and might result in data loss. However,
you can read and write to FAT32 partitions because of the simpler
technology used."

It would seem one can mount an NTFS filesystem from what it says on
the commandline. But that book edition was in ver 6.06/6.10 days.
Perhaps due to data loss complaints ubuntu development team decided to
leave it out in ver 8.04/8.10. I tried fedora, Suse, Mepis but always
preferred ubuntu [kubuntu i didn't like too many glitches] - haven't
tried any other distros for a while.

For practical use [i.e. being able to use a remote drive on linux,
windows home and work] it seems best to stick with FAT32. There is
http://www.fs-driver.org/ so that one can use ext2/ext3 on a home
windows machine.