Linux on a Windows Network
To communicate between a computer running Linux and Windows computers on the same network you need to configure the Linux machine to run Samba. There are plenty of books and sites that tell you how to do this including an online one from O'Reilly so I wont repeat the information here. All of the copies of the information that I have seen say pretty much the same thing so one is as good as another when it comes to telling you how to load it.
Most likely your Linux distribution has a version of Samba supplied with it. If you prefer to install the latest version then you can get it from SAMBA.org.
Installing Samba is not the easiest of things to do on Linux but it can be rewarding once you finally get your Linux and Windows computers able to communicate with one another. Following are a few quirks that I noticed while trying to set up this connectivity on my local network.
- Once Samba is installed on the Linux machine there should be an entry appear for that computer in Network Neighborhood on the Windows systems. When I first set this up clicking that link would return a "Computer not found or not responding" message. I eventually tracked down that the Allow Hosts field containing 192.168.0 was causing this even though both computers were on this network.
- Once the shared entries from the Linux machine do appear in Network Neighborhood you may still have problems opening them depending on your security settings in the Samba configuration. There are several ways to resolve this so you will need to read the setup documentation that you have to determine which is most suitable for you.
- When accessing windows shares from Linux you will need to first mount the shares using smbmount. This command needs root access to be able to run.
- For bringing up the Windows shares on Linux you may want to look at using Linneighborhood or Gnomba to provide a connection that appears similar to network neighborhood on the windows machines.
