Can the Driver write to an NTFS volume, too?
NO.
There are two drivers, currently. The original driver, in 2.4 has some write code in it, but it is extremely dangerous to use it. The possibility of destroying your filesystem is very high.
The new driver, introduced in 2.5.11, has no write code at all. This may sound like a backwards step, but it was necessary to rewrite the driver in order to make the future coding simpler and more solid.
Adding write support will take a long time. NTFS is built like a database. Any changes you make, necessitate making changes in many places, for consistancy. Make a mistake and the filesystem will be damaged, make too many mistakes and the filesystem will be destroyed. Also, the current developers are only working on NTFS as a hobby, during their free time.
Microsoft haven't released any documention about the internals of NTFS, so we had to reverse engineer the filesystem from scratch
that's why I can't write to my winxp partition on mandrake...
By default, only root will be able to read from this mounted volume
and how do I allow a normal user to read the ntfs partition? now I can read it only as root...