Please assist

[Alpha]

Hi Everyone,

I have been using Microsoft products since Dos 3.
I was always very happy with Dos. However the onset of Windows was a horrible disappointment. At one point I decided to try something different and went to OS/2 Warp but that was even worse than Windows. So for several years now I have used Windows. I am presently using W98 and I have no wish to upgrade to yet another Microsoft castrophe. As it is Windows crashes on this computer about once a month and I have to reinstall.

I had begun to hear a great deal of good things about Linux products. Recently I found this site and checked through all the links looking at the various OS's. After some consideration I decide to try ZipSlack. It setup quickly and easily but left me at only a text prompt. Since I don't have any documentation I have not been able to do much with it. So I decided to try again and came back to this site and linked to Winlinux. I ordered their CD (Which btw apparently comes with no documentation) and set it up. After several tries I got it working but the system consistently remained unstable. Further although I could connect to the internet through my network I could not connect to the other local computer on my network. I have found Winlinux to be consistently unstable even though it finds all my hardware and seems to configure it.

Although that was a bit of a disappointment I would still like to find a truly good stable version of Linux (I am sure there are many good ones out there) that comes with a manual and full oncomputer doc's/help files.

So here are my questions.

1. Will Linux work in a peer to peer setup with a windows computer? If so what client would you suggest for the windows computer?

2. If #1 will work then what version of Linux would you suggest that I buy? I have looked at Best Linux, Mandrake, Suse and RedHat (which I don't want because Winlinux is based on Redhat (of course that may just be Winlinux interpretation of redhat but I would rather find something else) ).
 
To clarify the above I need to be able to pass documents and html files back and forth between the 2 computers. I don't expect Windows executables to run under linux but I may wish to copy them across the network from time to time.

Further I have no problem with reconfiguring my hard disk for a linux product that will be stable but I would be just as happy to have it run on a dos partition.

So what I am looking for is network connectivity (both local and internet) with a stable OS that is not going to crash regularly.

Thanks in advance

Alpha

[Calum]

what a shame! i was just looking through the old posts, and nobody's replied to this! i hope alpha got what she/he was looking for in the end!
anybody got any quick answers to this question in case somebody else wants to know?

[Centurian]

Hey Calum,

 

quote:Originally posted by Calum:
what a shame! i was just looking through the old posts, and nobody's replied to this! i hope alpha got what she/he was looking for in the end!
anybody got any quick answers to this question in case somebody else wants to know?

Its alright. When I originally came here I signed up as Alpha and made one or 2 posts. Then the board went down. When it came back up I could not sign in as Alpha any longer because it said my password was invalid. Nor would the board allow me to remake the name saying it existed.
So I changed my name to Centurian and have been here ever since.

And yes I long ago learned the info I needed to know. I'm running Mandrake 8.1 now.

Thanks for the thought  

[Druid]

Centurian:
I seem to have a similar problem.  I have installed Mandrake 8.1 on my old PC.  It runs fine, and I have internet access via a Win2k box and cable modem.  I use a crossover cable to connect the 2 machines.  However, neither computer can see the other.  
The linux install was a clean install and I have assigned a suitable IP address and subnet mask to the linux box.
I can ping from linux to windows, but not from win to linux.
The network worked fine under win98 and 2k, so a hardware problem can be eliminated.
Any light you can shed on this would be appreciated
Thanks
Druid

[Centurian]

Hey Druid,

 

quote:Originally posted by Druid:
Centurian:
I seem to have a similar problem.  I have installed Mandrake 8.1 on my old PC.  It runs fine, and I have internet access via a Win2k box and cable modem.  I use a crossover cable to connect the 2 machines.  However, neither computer can see the other.  
The linux install was a clean install and I have assigned a suitable IP address and subnet mask to the linux box.
I can ping from linux to windows, but not from win to linux.
The network worked fine under win98 and 2k, so a hardware problem can be eliminated.
Any light you can shed on this would be appreciated
Thanks
Druid

You may know some of this already but here goes.

1. You should have Samba installed. If not install it.
 
2. Go into Mandrake Control Center.
Click Hardware. Click Mount Points. Click Ok on the Backup prompt or it wont let you go any further. Click the Samba Tab. Use the New button to setup your Windows drives on the other computer.

3. Go into the KDE Menu Configuration/Networking/Samba Configuration.
Set up all your Samba stats there.

4. You will need to make a special file on the other (windows) computers C:\windows directory.
Make a file called  hosts
In this file there should be 1 line for each computer on your network.
As an example

192.168.0.1
192.168.0.2

That would be the network address of the windows computer then the linux computer. Make sure these address's are accurate.

Now reboot the windows computer.
Restart the network and smb services on the linux computer or reboot.

Now your windows computer should see your linux computer and be able to ping it.  

That is as far as I have gotten with it so far. I am still working out being able to access linux files from windows. Not that I want the windows box to access the linux box but I do want to learn how to make it do so should I ever want it to.

As I am setting right now I can access any file on the windows box from the linux box which is how I want my network to stay.
Hope that helps some.

[Druid]

Thanks for the info, lots of stuff I did not know.

If I understand this correctly, Windows can not read native linux filesystems, so it will not be able to read files from the linux box *unless* there is a MS DOS FAT16/32 partition on it.  When I partitioned my linux drives I made a small DOS partition for this reason - it will be my "Shared" drive.

Druid

[lost]

quote:Originally posted by Druid:
Thanks for the info, lots of stuff I did not know.

If I understand this correctly, Windows can not read native linux filesystems, so it will not be able to read files from the linux box *unless* there is a MS DOS FAT16/32 partition on it.  When I partitioned my linux drives I made a small DOS partition for this reason - it will be my "Shared" drive.

Druid

You are correct in this, Windows does not read ext2/3 or some of the more rad filesystem types like xfs.  But there is a solution, Small Message Block.  SMB is what you have come to know as Microsoft Networking.  The Unix implementation is called Samba (http://www.samba.org).  Your distribution should come with this or should at least have a package to install.  You can run the server from the linux box and Windows will see the shares from Network Neighborhood.  You can copy, move, edit, delete, whatever via the shares since its happening over SMB and not ext2 or fat16.  Or you can do reverse.  Share drives on your windows computer and use the SMB client tools to mount the shares on your Linux Box.  Make sure to have SMB compiled into your kernel, some distros dont have it by default.  If you want a graphical Network Neighborhood for linux check out LinNeighborhood of freshmeat. But im sure Mandrake and Redhat and SuSE already come with something like that.

Read the samba server installation stuff or the samba client stuff depending on how you want to do things.

[lost]

quote:Originally posted by Druid:
Thanks for the info, lots of stuff I did not know.

If I understand this correctly, Windows can not read native linux filesystems, so it will not be able to read files from the linux box *unless* there is a MS DOS FAT16/32 partition on it.  When I partitioned my linux drives I made a small DOS partition for this reason - it will be my "Shared" drive.

Druid

Maybe i should learn to fucking read, what a retard i am.  Im going off on shaing network drives and your talking about local drives.  Tard is I.   Compile MSDOS support into your kernel and automounter support and you can mount /dev/hd[device][partition number] /[directory on your computer].  Sorry for being a gotard.

[Druid]

lost:
You were right first time, I am talking about network drives.  I have a Win2k box and a linux box, connected with a crossover cable.  I know linux can read most filesystems, and I know Win* thinks it is the only OS in the world so it doesn't even try to understand anything else.
When I installed Mandrake I set up a 500Mb FAT partition so that Win* would be able to understand something on the linux box, to make file transfers easier.
I am a complete newbie to linux, so I'm still trying to figure out how to get things working the way I would like them.  Mind you, I've only had a couple of years using Win*, since my Amiga finally stopped coping  

[dbl221]

Has anyone been able to mount an NTFS partition to Linux?????

[lost]

quote:Originally posted by dbl221:
Has anyone been able to mount an NTFS partition to Linux?????

I have, its rather quite simple.  Just make sure to stay away from writing to the Filesystem.  They werent kidding when they said highly experimental.  Learned that one the hard way i guess.

[voidmain]

I mount NTFS with good success but I do it read-only.  I don't know about Mandrake but RedHat ships you a kernel without NTFS support turned on at all so you have to recompile (probably want to go ahead and just get a later kernel).  I also include the kernel patches that let me do ACLs.  

On a non-NTFS related (but Samba related) note. With ACL support and the 2.2 version of Samba (or above, I recommend 2.3) I can make my Linux/Samba servers really act like an NT Server Domain Member (or even a PDC) on the network.  NT Domain users can log on to my Linux boxes with their NT domain ID/Passwords.  And you can set owner/group permissions to NT Domain user/groups in addition to the normal UNIX user/groups.  And with ACLs you can apply much more granular security than you can with just the "rwxrwxrwx user group" permissions.  And if you connect to my Samba servers with an NT/2000 client you can right click on a file/directory and set NT permissions just like you can on an NT server.  And I even have it set up so you can create shares on my Linux boxes using NT's SRVMGR.EXE (although you can only currently set share level permissions by adding the share from the UNIX side by editing the smb.conf or using swat).

[ March 08, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]