croberts
11-15-2003, 01:01 AM
I think I'm in over my head! I've just switched to using Mandrake 9.0 from Win98 and am a little confused on how to set up my MDK 9.0 machine and another PC running WindowsXP to "talk" to each other. I would like to file and print share if possible. My printer is connected to the MDK machine which is my main PC. Is there a way of doing this in layman's terms in which even I can understand? In advance, Thanks.
By the way...the two PC's are connected wirelessly. The WindowsXP has a USB wireless receiver and the MDK had the wireless outer on it.
Brink
11-15-2003, 03:42 AM
you need something called Samba. Windows uses something called Netbios (or atleast all NT does) that linux doesn't understand, Samba teaches linux how to read requests.
The easiest way to get started is probably to either download Samba with Swat (which is a web based admin that lets you configure various effects of Samba *it's much more configureable than Netbios on XP generally is*) Mandrake probably comes with samba I think (it's horrible I have mandrake and I can't recall) so you'll probably only need either Swat, or there's another utility called Webmin that will let you configure samba as well as practically everything else on your system. I recommend Webmin highly because doubtless after you get your Samba working there will be some other hurdle to cross.
I'm definately not a guru, I only got started with samba a little over a month ago maybe (and I'm not using it that much at that) but there's a few things you should watch out for:
- permissions on your shares (write/read/execute access) if you can't copy files, this might be the first thing to check
- you need a samba user, you can't use just any user on your linux system *eg root* without adding them to samba first, I don't know the security ramifications of using root as a samba user.
I'm probably forgetting something here, but I'm trying to leave out anything that is too misleading, or facts that I'm not too certain of yet.