Hi... I am running Madrake 9.2 on My system, and have win2k on another partition, where all My Mp3s are right now....... on that drive I also have a share so My daughter can acess them all. When I am on Unix tho, it's not accessable by her, Nor Me of course..Now...

a) how can I pull them all over to My unix system for Me to use,
b) how do I set up a shared dir, that My daugher can use without having to use bandwidth to get at?

also...... I have a tonn of compressed mp3 (wavs) and they won't play on My new system, do I need a special codec for Unix (or it's equiv)

My suggestion:

1) create a new fat32 partition
2) transfer files to be shared to it
3) move the location of your Win2k share apporitately
4) setup your fat32 partition in /etc/fstab
5) from Unix install and setup Samba
6) create a Samba share identical to your Win2k share

Connecting computers shouldn't know the difference. Else, consider getting and old box and turning it into a fileserver.

Rather than creating a new fat32 partition why not just:

-mount the win2k partition in mandrake
-set up samba in mandrake to use the same name as the win2k box uses
-set up a file share in samba mapped to the win2k partition with the same name as it's shared under in win2k

If you set it up right then when you are booted into mandrake your box will show up on the network with the same windows name and shared MP3 folder as it does when it is running win2k.

Check for HOWTOs for samba at http://www.tldp.org/ maybe the SMB HOWTO. They also have HOWTOs for mounting a windows partition under linux.

As far as MP3s there are lots of MP3 players for Linux and a normal Mandrake install should have at least one installed xmms is a common one, it looks and acts a lot like winamp but there are many others too.

By default the Linux kernel can NOT write to an NTFS partition. It depends on the how W2K was installed if it's a NTFS or Fat32 partition.

Yes, I know Linux can write to NTFS if the kernel is compiled to do so, but I doubt this guy wants to recompile his kernel to write to NTFS.

Granted, if he only wants to play the songs and not write any new files to the directory then he's fine to use NTFS.

MrKnisely

If you're accessing through Samba it's not mounted as NTFS...it's smbfs, which does allow writing. I'm not sure how this works, as essentially the drive is still NTFS, but Samba seems to be capable of overriding the read-only attribute.

Have you actually tried such a setup before? I thought NTFS write support even via Kernel recompile was experimental? Or has this changed with Kernel 2.6?

If you setup a samba share of a mounted NTFS partition it is still no writeable. You can connect to a Win share of an NTFS partition and read/write it, but not a natively mounted NTFS partition.

Think about it, if it's mounted read only the kernel can't write to it. If the kernel can't write, ain't nobody writin'.

NTFS writing is still experimental in 2.6. I expect it to remain experimental for some time to come. The reason for this is that MS keeps changing the version of NTFS, I think they are at version 5 now.

cheers,

MrKnisely

Sorry I misread Cher's post...I thought there were 2 systems running, but it's 2 partitions on the same machine...