I have an external drive with a primary 93GB ext3 partition. The enclosure has both USB 2 and FW400 connections. I tried both, and the macintel hackintosh running Tiger didn't see a thing. The Disk Utility doesn't see it either. Is it supposed to?

OS X can only read/write from HFS, HFS+, UFS (this is what "Unix File System" in Disk Utility refers to - not ext2/3 that is common on Linux) and FAT. It can read NTFS.

Your only hope is eventually getting support for ext2/3 through MacFUSE.

Actually now can mac write to ntfs 2 form inside.

But that is an other story

I just realized that I mentally substituted "unix filesystem" with "ext2/3" when I saw that as a format option.

It's a shame that Apple has neglected ext3 so far. It's quite common, and maintenance free, and it's an open standard.

How can Apple officially support NTFS? Has Microsoft shared the secret NTFS spec with Apple? I'm assuming Apple would not attempt to reverse engineer it. I have avoided NTFS to the maximum extent practical because the spec is closed, and the linux drivers for it are (and always will be) experimental; in addition to the fact that NTFS fragments.