Moving files between different OSs
 

A mate of mine is using Mandriva 2005 which came on a coverdisc the other week. He only really uses it for wordprocessing, and he uses openoffice. When we installed it, it asks you wether or not you want to use Microsoft Word format to save files or OpenOffice's native format. We chose Word so he could open it up at work at a later date. Now, what's the best way to open it up on a PC at his works? They use Win XP Pro with Office 2002. I know the file system is different so I'm guessing taking the .doc files in on a floppy wouldn't be read by Windows.
My first thought was to put it on mine (I dual boot with SUSE and XP), copy it to my Linux partition, and then drag it over to XP using Partition Magic's file browser on my Windows partition. The it could be saved on a Windows floppy. Okay, that would work out okay, but its a pain in the arse everytime he needs something doing. Is there another way for him to be able to print his stuff at work? No internet access from his machine yet, no CD/DVD burner so floppy or USB is the only option I can see. Mabye there's a tool or something? Help?

Thanks
Adam

lol.. I remember when I thought like that.

you don't need to do anything special... you just need to make sure the media that you are transporting it on (floppy, usb, whatever) is formatted in something that can be read from windows (if you can browse the floppy in windows, it already is, if not, see below). and then all you have to do is just copy the files across with drag and drop, or copy-paste, or from the commandline with "cp" or whatever method you usually would copy files with.

to format your floppy in windows, right-click A: -> format. in the windows that opens up, choose FAT or FAT32 as the filesystem, and check the "quick format" checkbox to make it format faster, then click "start".
if there is an option to format in NTFS as well as FAT and FAT32, don't choose NTFS or linux will not be able to use it.

For a fun trick, pop the floppy in to the drive (under Mandrake/Mandriva), open a console, and type format a:

On my system (SuSE) I get the following message:


kai:/> format a:
Error: The DOS concept of formatting disk media is screwed.
To format a floppy, use "fdformat /dev/fd0"
and then "mkfs.minix /dev/fd0"