ndckevin
10-14-2002, 11:03 AM
I am going to try to set up a file server at our small office and take down a windows box which holds all of the programs for configuring our Netgear print server, and a Linksys Router. I have not been able to locate any drivers or software for Linux.
It's as if these companies think that windows is the only OS on the planet........ I am extremely new to linux, but it would occur to me that with the number of linux and unix server systems out there, that there would be more resources available on these websites. Oh well, just a rant.
Any suggestions..........
Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379
10-14-2002, 12:14 PM
It depends on what type of hardware you're running for this fileserver.
If you have a newer machine with at least 128MB of RAM, and you are fairly new to Linux, then Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com) or Mandrake (http://www.linux-mandrake.com) would be decent user-friendly distributions to put on your box to make it do what you said you needed.
If the machine's a little older, with less RAM than what I said earlier, you might want to look into Debian (http://www.debian.org). It's set up to be extremely customiable and it has nearly 3000 packages available to it through the "apt" suite of features. The only thing is, though, is it's not considered as user friendly as Red Hat or Mandrake. But if you decide that you'd like to stick with Linux and you feel like you're becoming more advanced, you'll probably feel inclined to stick with a distribution like Debian anyways.
For the filesharing, you'll either need to set up an FTP server or run Samba (http://us1.samba.org/samba/samba.html). Samba allows Windows machines to see a *nix box through the Network Neighborhood as if it were a WinNT/2k/9x machine. In fact, Samba can even replace a Windows NT or 2k server in being a Domain Controller.
Finally, if you get stuck, check out Google (of course!) (http://www.google.com) and The Linux Documentation Project (http://www.tldp.org) for pointers. If all else fails, then come back here-- Somebody can probably get you going back in the right direction!