Is there anyway to setup Linux to act more like Windows, as far as hostnames are concerned? For instance, with a network of Windows PCs, if there is a computer named "blah", you can type "ping blah", and it just works. Similarly, you can access its shares by going to "\\blah". I know this is possible by editing /etc/hosts, but I'm wondering if there's a way to make it automatic like Windows does.

Windows will use a Master Browser to store the browsing list, and has updated from Win2000 onwards with a "WINS" server, or via dns with Active Directory

The Lisa daemons in Linux read either/both of these services and can make them available for browsing.

See http://us3.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...kBrowsing.html for samba browsing support..

So is this more or less only possible within a Samba framework? That is, does it only work when I'm sharing files?

Right now, from Linux, I can connect to smb://windows. However, I can't 'ping windows'. Also, from windows, I can't connec to \\linux and 'ping linux' doesn't work.

Sorry if these are stupid questions, but I'm still very much new to this.

The important aspect is how your pc picks up the dns info from either a WINS server or an Active Directory server.
Active Directory updates a dns server, so you would need to select that dns server first, which is decided by the order of dns servers in /etc/resolv.conf
WINS makes info available by browsing, eg using the smbtree command, or nmblookup. You can select to browse this first by changing your /etc/nsswitch.conf file to show wins first in the "hosts:" list. eg
hosts: wins files dns

A good combination is a WINS server and a dhcp server. When pc's boot, they are given an ip number, a name and a dns entry, and told to use a WINS server. You could then find them by using that dns server.

To access shares on the Linux box, you will need samba to be running; nmbd to give a name, and smbd to give shares