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.