Well, it was easy with Redhat, but since Redhat doesn't include a driver for my onboard lan (mdk does), and without networking I'm finding it difficult to get one (I guess I could use a floppy or a cd...), I put mandrake back in and it works with all my hardware.

However, the rest of my network is Windows and I would like to enable sharing of the files on the linux box to the windows boxes. Redhat had a feature to add samba shares right in the menus. However, I can't find it anywhere in mandrake. I enabled the samba client/server packages so I know I have the software installed; I just don't know how to specified which directories are shared.

You can try a couple of things :

Option 1. swat - Samba Web Administration Tool. Recommended.

If your Mandrake distribution has swat active, you can access it by going to the following URL : "http://localhost:901/" with either Mozilla or Konquerer.

If that doesn't work, swat is either not installed or not active.

Do the following to check if 'swat' is installed :

"rpm -qa |grep -i swat"
- or -
"which swat"
- or -
"man swat"

If this results in something nice, you've got 'swat' installed. :-)

Under Red Hat (which I use) 'swat' can be turned on via xinetd :
"vi /etc/xinetd.d/swat"
"service xinetd restart"

I'm quite sure Mandrake offers something similar.

Try to access it with URL : "http://localhost:901/"


Option 2. Webmin. I'm not sure if Mandrake carries this. I think so.

Try to access it with URL : "http://localhost:10000"


Option 3. Use the plain old Unix way of configuring things :

"cd /etc/samba"
"man smb.conf"
"vi smb.conf"

Good luck!