Accessing Windows Machines from Mandrake 9.1
 

Hey Guys!

I finally bit the bullet and installed Mandrake 9.1 on a spare workstation here at work on our Windows 2000 Network.

Now after editing the smb.conf file as recommended on the net, I can see my Linux box in the windows machines and can access docs which I have shared in the box under documents.

However, in Konqueror under smb:/ it will show the network WORKGROUP but then when you click on that it says, cannot connect to host localhost..

In GNOMBA it shows the workgroup, but only the linux box and one of the windows workstations (there are six). When you click on the one windows workstation showing, it returns an error message..

In Linneighborhood there is nothing showing up at all..

I just want to be able to browse my windows machines from my Linux box :)

And also, will mandrake run windows exe files for installing programs at all?

Thanks for your help

You may need to right-click in the browsing window for Lin-neighborhood and select "scan as user" or "scan groups as use." Put your windows username and password and that may help solve the problem.

Cheers.

You may also want to point Samba to your WINS server.

First off, the bit about getting the GUI of samba to work properly, I have no idea. I've ended up using the command line stuff, but then again I'm a comand line junkie. (just look at my other posts:)) I guess I'll try to post those commands when I get home just to give you guys a headache.

As for the question of running .exe files on Mandrake, sort of. You have to get some sort of windows emulator or layer or something. Wine is the popular free one, but it requires a deccent amount of set up to get working. It's mostly straight forward, but requires some time and patience. Win4Lin is a nifty proggy that allows you to install a copy of win95-winME (no NT based vers.) ontop of Linux without as much as having to create a windows partition. When it works, it works well and makes using network neighborhood between Linux boxes and win boxes a breeze. (that whole being native and all) Problem is that it has to fiddle with the kernel and if not closed properly it can trash X. I had this happen while putting it through its paces for a class report, but then again I was trying to break it. The bad news is that wine sort of supports DirectX and win4lin doesn't support it at all.

Hope that helps, and one of these days I'm going to post a short msg.

Oh shoot, forgot. Just to make sure you know, Mandrake (along with most *nix systems) defaults to creating new files that won't execcute. This includes copying files from another system. So you're going to have to use chmod to fix the file. Read the man page on that, this post is too long as is.

LinNeighborhood should also be installed, and it usually works quite well for network browsing.