Hello all.
This is my first post here in the forums and moderators if I put this in the wrong place I apologize and please move it to the proper place. I am so far enjoying the challenge of learning a new operation system and the idea of such a community of support. I was given the task by my boss to try to figure out how to incorporate linux into the company and make it relatively seamless. We currently are operating on WinXP Pro and he would like to get away from it if possible. I couldn't agree more. I have downloaded several distro's and installed them to have my boss check each one out for ease of use and look/feel. He has settled on Suse 10.1 so far and now comes the hard part. The software we are currently using for day to day operations is Windows based and they are not looking to create any other versions any time soon. I took the computer running Suse 10.1 back to my home and now have to get it to work over a network. If I trash something on my personal network at home it won't bother the corporate environment. I installed the company software program through the console with wine and got it running on the Suse machine with the data files necessary to make it operate copied into the programs specified folder under Windows ( C:\program\datafiles). The normal path we use in Windows at work is \\Server\c\program\datafiles which we set by right clicking on the desktop icon and changing the 'Start in'. The main files normally have to be stored on a server for everyone to have access to them, which right now is like I said XP running on a NTFS partition. This is no big deal because I can just Partition Magic the hard drive and make a FAT32 partition for now to keep the data there until the transition seems to be working fine and move the server to linux later on. Here are the questions I have and hope that this great community can give this Newbie some much needed help.

1) First of all, is what I am trying to achieve even possible?

2) Is it possible to have it so when only certain users sign in that the server files system is mounted, not just when the computer is started? We have many employees and they use the computers for web searches for technical support, email and other things but they don't need access to the data stored on the server.

3) How do I set up the mount properly and make it mimic the Windows 'Start in' path? The program is a little bit finicky and will not start if the files are not in the correct place.

4) How do I make it so that when the user logs out that the file system is unmounted?

I hope this makes sense and if you need more clarification, please post and ask questions.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Scott M37

Hi. I think I have some answers, but more general than particular.

1) Yes. With Linux anything is possible .
2) I don't quite understand your question. Why would you want the filesystem be mounted anytime an user wants to access it? Wouldn't it be more easy to just mount it once and to let (specific) users to access it? In this case, you need Samba..
3) Well, I don't know anything about 'shortcuts' in the desktop environment you use, but the universal way is to make a shell script like this:

#!/bin/bash
cd /the/start/path/you/want
exec "the program you want"

The key here is "cd". It changes the current working directory for the current context(this script), meaning the program will start with this new working directory.
4) But if 100 users want to access the same filesystem? It would be too costly on the processor....

Hope solves something..