This is something that has been bugging me ever since I first started using Ubuntu as my main system: I am able to format a USB flash drive with Gparted or the makefs CLI commands, but the drive works only in Linux. Both Windows and Mac OS X complain when I put in a FAT32 drive formatted in Linux, and won't let me access the disk.

Since I work with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X all the time, I want to have a flash drive that works on all the systems. What I've been doing is formatting the drive using Windows, which makes it compatible with all the operating systems (Panther, at least, has the same problem as Ubuntu here). But, it doesn't feel like this is the way things are supposed to be.

Is there any way to make a FAT32 drive in Ubuntu that is compatible with all of these OSes? (If someone has advice about doing the same from Mac OS X, that would also be greatly appreciated.)

I am using Ubuntu Desktop Jaunty, kernel version 2.6.28-16-generic; Mac OS X 10.3.9; and Windows 7.