TC/MC + Samba on VM for Win7 access to XFS/JFS/Reiser filesystems?

[Fx]

My first foray into Linuxland was fairly standard and conservative -- an Ubuntu/Vista dual-boot laptop with cross-platform filesharing enabled by NTFS drivers on the Linux side and ext2/3 drivers on the Windows side.  That laptop died from multiple hardware issues (due mostly to excessive heat, the cancer of many 'too-young-to-die' laptop failures) and I'm now in the process of configuring my new laptop.

Some things I didn't like about my first setup were Ubuntu/GNOME bloat, the weak performance of the ext3 filesystem, and what I considered to be excessive resource usage to support my NTFS external HDs.  So for my new setup, I'm considering a Arch/Gentoo/xPUD/Lubuntu/Win7 multi-boot monster (I've basically gone insane, lol) with XFS- or JFS-formatted external HDs (devoted to media files), and either ext4 or JFS for my internal HD shared data partitions.

My problem is, there seem to be no free reliable Windows drivers for XFS or JFS, and ext4 support is limited to ext2 drivers (so no journaling or extents).
 
I've read in various places that some people have gotten around this M$ limitation by running Linux VM inside Windows and sharing the files using Samba.  Seemed like a sensible approach, provided that the Linux used didn't consume too much resources.  Briefly considered a 'roll-it-yourself' minimal install using the Linux From Scratch (LFS) methodology, but I lack the expertise for that (at least right now).  Core Linux is another possibility, but I found a reference to TinyCore/MicroCore and am attracted to the small run-in-10MB-of-RAM footprint.

Question is, have any of you done this already (or something similar) and could you provide advice/tips/help when I get stuck?  (I'm dreaming about a packaged solution, but I'll learn more if I slog thru the process myself, I imagine.)  I'm also curious if anyone has found this to be a good approach for cross-platform filesharing, in terms of performance and system resource usage (both CPU load and memory footprint).

Also, would MicroCore Linux + Samba be sufficient?  I probably don't really need (or want) a GUI for the Linux inside VirtualBox just to serve up files on JFS filesystems or to run a few Linux commands from terminal, right?  After all, if I needed to use a Linux application that depended on X, I'd be booted into one of the Linux distros.... this is really just about file access from Windows and commands I'd use like rsync or cmp.

Thanks in advance for your feedback and advice!

[stunix]

For me its easy, as long as you have a machine with enough ram, I'd use vmware and the assorted virtual machines I like to use.  I currently use a Lenovo x61 vista with 2G of ram and keep vms of CENTOS (webserver), and XPpro (thunderbird&firefox) running both with 256mb ram.  every now and then I may fire up any one of the vms I keep on my server, ranging from SLES10 to win95, and also use an empty config for isolinux distros on my monthly copy of linux mag.  Using vms is good because backing them up is easy and you can swap anything anytime, however I find that its also better to use LCLI thrugh putty and win thrugh RDC rather than directly thru VMware, just personal preference.  The upshot of all these os's is that my central fileserver is a local machine with samba and ftp servers running.  Generally network drivers are handled transparently by vm.

[curaga]

I would recommend against using JFS or XFS on a laptop, simply because they're both designed for UPS-backed servers. If you run out of battery, they won't be as graceful with your data as the ext family is.

I have experience with JFS (no lost data, but did require a reformat after the battery ran out), and have heard horror stories of XFS from friends and anons over the net (they include lost data).

[tinypoodle]

Hmm, In my own experience and confirmed by reports of anons over the net I would not call the ext family that graceful in cases of power outages or unclean shutdowns due to other reasons. There was a time I could have repeatedly told horror stories about ext3 (I have no experience with ext4 and from pure theory would expect ext2 being less safe/robust in comparison to ext3).

OTOH I would call reiserfs (3.5 and 3.6) pretty robust in case of unclean shutdowns.
Also reiserfsck has never been as problematic to me as e2fsck at times in the past (perhaps that has improved since then).

In reference to OP - umm, that was a long time ago... -
ltools can access ext2/ext3 read-write and reiserfs read-only under DOS and windows.

Also there are native ext2/ext3 third party drivers for windows which integrate pretty well.