Hopefully I'm not going to ask anything that has already been asked a million times, if so I'm sorry.
I'm looking at upgrading a server for a small non-profit organization. I'm no IT professional by any stretch of the imagination but somehow I ended up in charge.
I guess I'll start with what we currently have.......
We have a server running NT with about 25 client machines. All but one of these are running win98 with 1 running win2k. The cost of server 2003 is out of reach for us however one of the versions of Redhat w/service is do-able.
The current server is used sparingly right now for file storage but every user must login. We don't even have e-mail running yet.
So I guess my biggest concern is being able to go with a linux server with as little change for the end user as possible.
Can I continue to have everyone login as they do now?
Can I export the user information from NT?
Can I expect any major problems??

Thanks in advance for any help.

With a Linux server, and clients of the Windows/Linux/Other OS, the setup you require is possible using Samba. I haven't done a network setup myself, but from my readings, Samba is first setup on the server, then you setup each client (Samba shares) to address the server. If I understand things correctly, loggins would continue as before. I don't know if you can import the user logins from Windows, or if you have to manually recreate them. Can you expect major problems? Yes. You are not acquaninted with LInux. The learning curve can be quite steep. I'd suggest you use a Linux distro which includes Webmin, which has a Samba module to ease the setup. It the distro you choose doesn't include Webmin, you can get and install it from www.webmin.org, and there are additional modules available which may not be included in the original package. As far as email is concerned, once you have the server up and running, there are several antivirus apps (free for workstation and non-proffit orgs, fee for for-proffit orgs) which can be updated at regular intervals, and mainly protect the Windows machines from virii/worms/trojan horses, since Linux is not yet the target of attackers. However, be advised, it has been demonstrated that it is possible to write a virus to attack both Windows and Linux systems, so antivirus protection is a necessity.