I'm a geek with mostly ms and NetWare experience. All my networking was NetWare 3 & 4 on ms OSs. Now, in order to avoid the temptation of piracy, I'm moving to an open system. I have:

1. A perfectly legal XP machine that my wife and kids use. It's got a 30+GB HDD, so I'm not very worried about space.
I've installed CygWin on this to try to get things running.

2. An AMD Athlon 950 with 256MB RAM and 100 GB HDD, SiS 6326 video (4MB), SiS 900 Ethernet, SiS i810 sound card and Fedora 3 (KDE) - a system I've become very happy with in the last couple o' days. This machine is named, creatively enough, "server".
a. I have three partitions on that 100 GB drive. When I originally set it up, I was running '98, so I loaded Western Digital's drive overlay. The three partitions were all FAT32. I then blew away the original partition and now have the following:
1. hda - 19GB - Linux native
2. hda5 - 32GB - FAT32 (mounted as /d-drive)
3. hda6 - 32GB - FAT32 (mounted as /e-drive)

3. An Intel MMX 233 with 32MB RAM and 10GB HDD, I can't find my documentation on the video and LAN at the moment... It's running FreeBSD (since I can't get Fedora to load on it - too little RAM). This machine is named "mail"

Anyway, what I would like to do is as follows (in order of priority):
1. Run KDE in a window on the XP machine
2. Access the FAT32 partitions without whacking them. Of course, I could probably tar them and ftp them to the 233... but I don't really want to do that right now.
3. Set up the 233 as a mail server


I don't really know how to set up the Servers on my Fedora box. I've had a lot of problems with Samba, and I kinda gave up on it for now. I would rather focus on running X on the XP box. I cannot telnet into the Fedora box, but I can FTP from both the XP and FreeBSD machines. I have not loaded anything on the FreeBSD box -- am thinking about whacking and re-loading it when I see what y'all say.

BTW -- I've searched for some of this information in other formats, but I'm having problems putting it all together.

Thanks in advance for the answers.

Adios,
Clay Harryman

OK, you have a good deal of work. For the 233 as a mail server, I strongly recommend Slackware. Install only the a application set, all of the ap application set you need, and tcp/ip, postfix, samba (to access the fat32 partitons), dhcp, and everything else you need from the n application set. To choose apps, choose menu as the installation type in Slackware. If you want a GUI, install fluxbox as the window manager from the xap app set. If you want a webmail interface, try Squirrelmail. Also, if you want to be able to administer the server remotely, install webmin. (Squirrelmail & Webmin have to be downloaded from their web sites.)

I can't help with the FAT32 or Cygwin.
I know you need Samba and an ethernet cable to access the FAT32 partitions.

-------
linuxgeekery

open up a terminal as root

enter "chmod 777 /"

list your ip address

that should help things

I can't write to the FAT32 partitions from the Fedora box, either. From what I've gleaned from this and other forums, RedHat/Fedora has a problem with these type partitions. I can mount them as VFAT, and I've tried making sure the FSTAB says they are read/write. But I still get errors every time I write, even as root or su. I've tried mounting them as FAT32 (Hardware Browser recognizes them as that), but it says the kernel doesn't recognize this filesystem.

If I've read right, then this system should be able to recognize NTFS (with a little help downloaded from somewhere). I'm thinking about putting this drive in the XP box, using Disk Manager to convert the FAT32 to NTFS and bring it back here. That won't affect the Linux partition at all, will it?

Thanks,
Clay

PS -- foodhater, I know what
chgmod 777 /
does -- and I don't want to go there. Nor do I recommend anyone else out there try it!