How to connect a Linux and a Windows system?
 

My apologies if a thread answering this already exists, but when I tried the search function a couple of minutes ago it wouldn't respond.

I guess I need a walkthrough for the terminally stupid on how to connect a Linux system to a Windows system in order to share directories and printers. Books, man pages, internet sites and whatnot explain in detail how to connect one or the other to an existing network, but I need something taking things from three more steps back or so. I have no existing network in the first place.

What I've got: There's a Linux computer running SuSE 9.1, and it is connected to the internet. There's a second computer with Win98 SE, connected to the Linux one by Ethernet cable (with adapter so no router is required). I have no idea how to set up the Windows network environment or the Linux network environment so the two sides can exchange files, use each other's printers etc. My questions are of the kind like 'do I need to activate WINS, what do I enter in the fields if I do, what is a gateway and what address do I use for it, etc.'.

I have installed Samba on the Linux machine and given it the DNS address 192.168.1.1; the address of the Win machine is 192.168.1.2. Both machines can ping each other perfectly. But that is where it ends. The Windows machine currently doesn't even turn up in its own network neighbourhood, probably because there's some value wrong or missing.

Apart from the working ping I'm pretty sure that the hardware side of things is ok because I booted the Windows machine with Knoppix once and managed to telnet between the computers.

There is no firewall on the Windows machine, and the in-built SuSE firewall is active on the Linux machine; from boot messages I've gathered that I need to open port 139 for Samba to work, which I've done.

I'm grateful for any help.

Robin

Good but you also need to install and run samba on the linux machine.
Just install it from your SuSe CD and make it start at boot time.

I have installed and configured Samba using Yast2 already. I suppose it is running, too. However, trying http://localhost:901 to connect to swat doesn't work (connection refused), so something might still be amiss.

Robin

If you have sshd installed in your linux box (and it is running), then you can access from Windows to linux file system with WinSCP.

Personally, I don't use smb shares anymore in my linux boxes, instead I have sshd daemon running. I can access to my linux boxes from Windows with ssh and WinSCP, and from linux to linux I can use just scp from the console, or just writing scp://hostname/ to konqueror (KDE)

i have a similar problem,
I am using SuSE Live Eval
but i cant find out how to get my wireless network working, (the other computer on the wireless network is running windows xp.
i am using an ASUS wireless lan pci adapter, and also i cant access any of my cd drives/ floppy drive can anyone help ?

My problem is much more basic than using ssh or telnet or whatever. I need to know what I have to enter in the various setup fields for the network neighbourhood in Windows, and matching settings with Yast 2. I suppose there's an error or several in what I did so far, so nothing works. I'm relatively sure that the problem is on the Windows side as, as I said, I could use the settings in Linux when I booted the other computer with Knoppix. Of course that doesn't mean that Samba is configured properly, so that could be part of the problem, too.

Robin

Since you can ping from each PC the network is configured correctly.

Windows sharing.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows98/u...areprinter.asp
http://www.wellesley.edu/Computing/F...s/win98me.html

Swat is a webserver tool for the configuring the samba smb.conf file and runs independently. It is a nice tool but you can edit the smb.conf with any text editor. The default location is /etc/samba/smb.conf. You need to change the default workgroup name to match the workgroup name in windows. The default windows workgroup name is workgroup. Then add a smb user using the same name as your Windows 98 user via the smbpasswd command.


To see if samba is running look at you processes via top or ps ax commands. smbd and nmbd are the samba deamons.

There is lots of samba documentation on the web.
www.samba.org

Samba itself comes with a lot of fairly useful documentation (on my Debian system it's in the samba-doc package).
DIAGNOSIS(.txt.gz) is particularly good, and there's lots of other good stuff, including some help for the windows side of things
If connection is refused at port 901 you probably aren't running SWAT, but as michaelk says, you don't need to. Even a relative newbie like myself finds it simpler to just configure smb.conf by hand (back it up first!); it's fairly well commented.
I have the Linux box be a wins server, and on windows I tell it the Linux box's IP address.