My son has a new MacBook Pro and I want to put some files on an external 
USB drive for him.  The MacBook has two USB 3.0 ports and I have a Seagate 
3 TB drive with USB 3.0.  The Seagate comes formatted with "fuseblk" 
(according to "df -T"), which seems to mean NTFS.

That mostly works but I've had occasional serious problems with data loss 
that I think might be caused by failure of the USB connection (e.g., my 
littlest kid yanks the cord out) or system crashes.  Thus, I would prefer 
to use a journaling file system, but I'm not sure which is best.

I am using Ubuntu, FWIW.

In this case, I'll be putting files on the drive and giving it to my son, 
so it is more important that the file system works well with Mac OS X than 
with Linux.  It looks like HFS+ can be used with Ubuntu using the package 
hfsprogs, but I get the impression that it is limited and might only 
create non-journaling versions of HFS+.

Any advice?  Is there another journaling file system that would work with 
a new OS X box, but that I can create via Linux?  It looks like we can get 
ext2/3/4 to work on OS X only by adding a $40 proprietary program, and I 
don't know how well that would actually work.

I could try to borrow a Mac and do it that way, but then I'd have go 
figure out in the Mac how to format an external drive for HFS+.  I'd also 
have to find a Mac to borrow, which might be difficult.

Mike