I am a Linux newbie but am forcing my way forward with doing a total Linux conversion of the machines on my home network.

Let me try to organize this question and please bear with me. Of the 5 systems I am, dealing with;

1. I have one running Fedora Core 4 and it is doing most of what I want it to be able to do this point. It can run, handle, process, read and right pretty much as I need it too, and it seems stable and I am happy (thanks in part to this forum)
2. One is booting from a FC4 Live DVD ( My step daughters share it)
3. One is XP and will remain that way until last so is moot
4. One is my wife's system and stuck at XP She will be able to dual boot, and is ready and willing to go all Linux except for Photoshop CS. She is a graphic artist and The Gimp is not ready for primetime at her level, CMYK support, layer adjustments etc plus she works from home and has to run XP for her work but that is an entirely diff issue and I do not want to derail myself).
5. Last is our file server, and the crux of my question. it is a hardworking P3-450, 512MB RAM, and 4 hard drives (20 GIG boot drive and a 60,80 and 200GIG) that right now runs a stripped down version of XP, Foobar, Audigy card and acts as global storage/juke box. We VNC into it now to play music, and everyone has different mapped spaces for backup and shared spaces for transfer. I would like to convert it to FC4 next, but when you google things about xp linux and filesystems it becomes a nightmare of links that are completely irrelevant. Really when it all boils down to it, I want to be able to convert all the drives to the most stable file system I can and keep using it in the same manner and accessible to the XP box and to any flavor of Linux I end up running (within reason) without having to pull all the data off, and convert them repeatedly in the future.

What would you all recommend as far as setting this system up, I do not expect anyone to write me a book, but links, and recommendations would be very useful. With all this in mind...

How should I setup this system so I can continue to use it as a file server and juke box?

What file system should I make the data drives, should I partition the boot drive into ext3 and a swap and leave the rest NTFS ( that seems to be silly) or what would be your advice.

Yes! I am poor, do not pick on my mismatched file server :-)

Kylere
All Linux by September or Death!

I strongly reccomend the use of ext3 or reiserfs for production-grade systems, even home fileservers. Much better filesystem integrity.

Searching this forum I found this quote and it seems as if others in the thread agree, "All files shared between OSes should be in FAT32." I would like to avoid this and have the file server run ext3 or reiserfs for the journalling capability ( especially as space always wins over mirroring in my checkbook) but can you seamlessly map drives and read and right to ext3/reiserfs from XP?

Hmm I guess this is technically a windows question, but I know windows and do not know the answer.

FAT32 is only used to share files on the same computer in a dual boot configuration.

I run a Samba fileserver that has a 200GB hard drive, formatted as reiserfs. Samba exports these as Windows-style shares. So yes, this will work without a problem.

Great, that is ideal for me then, I really appreciate the time you put in on this site!

No problem. Hope to see you around here more.