hello.

i've installed ubuntu, and have a small lan consisting of two pcs, one pure winXP, and my with winXP/ubuntu. i have a fat32 partition for sharing and i can't get to it from linux [it looks empty]. i googled a little and changed the /etc/fstab to look like this:

/dev/hda5 /winblows vfat user,rw,noauto 0 0

at first it looked ok, i could do anything as a regular user. but now [a few days after], again i see nothing, and i as far as i can remember, i haven't changed a thing. what could be the problem?

also, a question about samba, how to allow windows user to access my linux share folder? he's prompted for username/password every time, and he can't get pass that even with my linux usernames, root also.

I can't help you with the vfat thing (works fine with me...).

I have samba running at home though, and here's what I did:

First, I created a new user account on the linux box that was identical with the user account name on the windows box. Then, in webmin, there's an option to synchronise samba accounts/passwords with system accounts/passwords. After I did this, everything worked.

change it to:

/dev/hda5 /winblows vfat umask=0222 0 0

and you'll be able to access it as a user in linux, but you'll need to be root to write to it, which for me is a nice safety thing.

yes, but i wanted to be able to keep my docs so that i can change them from linux and windows, a friend told me linux won't see ntfs so i put fat32. maybe ntfs is a better solution?

NTFS write support is experimental at best. FAT32 is the best option.