Hi All, really don't know shit from clay with Windows or Linux however, I do know that it is the stablest (is that a word?) platform (Samba something), for my money that I have ever had in my office! Although I was constantly on the phone to the tech who setup for me to do something it was worth the effort.

I am now pretty much in retirement mode and decided to learn a bit about this Linux and my only qualm is the user friendliness (esp. without GUI). With that said, I am now on my 3rd install of Mandriva LE 2005 as I tweak and play and am enjoying myself immensely as it installs so much quicker the MS. I guess that is the key to anything to do with software/hardware!!!!

First time, I did "auto allocate" for the filesystem types and all worked fine including hardware, then I blew something and changed a bit here and there and again wow... no problems. Third time around I've added a second drive and some errors came up booting so I'm doing the install again as it is so straight forward.

QUESTION
I have a 12gb master(hda) and 40gb(hdb) slave with no other hardware issue existing in prior setups. I am only looking to have a box that will sit on a home (mainly xp pro systems) lan and hold files for the kids to access and for me to fiddle with as a past-time. In the filesystem setup, what would is a good option for the various partition "types" and "mount points", etc? Is the there an optimum setup???

As I said, illiterate and running ragged going from site to site, thread to thread; is there a straight forward answer that someone can post????

Appreciate it very much.

Bob

Hello and welcome to linux questions.
I would assign
5g to /
512mb to swap
the rest of hda the 12g drive to /usr
Then I would just assign hdb the second hardrive to
/home
Very basic but it would get the job done.
For sharing folders and files within an mixed enviornment there is Samba.
http://us1.samba.org/samba/
You will most likely be sharing files or folders from your /home dir...but you made it big enough so no worries.
There are alot of options to your setup but the one above is simple enough.
Filesystem type I would choose resierfs, but thats just me ext3 is good as well.
Hope it helps some...I did not go into much detail as this site alone has a plethora of information related to this topic alone.
Hope I helped some and sorry if I posted wrong info.

Cool... thanks for the promptness!

That seems similar to the original setup I found was but I copied from a site for setting up a server. There were quite a few extra programs and bits and pieces that I figured I could do without for now, or a least get some more time on Linux under my belt.

I'll go with this and see where I end up.

Thanks again lord-fu.

Bob

My pleasure.