[ltp] Tips for working Linux and Windows- a request for help or advice

[Tod Harter]

On Saturday 11 May 2002 23:35, Shane A Broomhall wrote:
> HI All,
>
> I have managed to persuade my work that having Linux as my operating
> system on my laptop will still allow for me to carry out my work as
> needed.  I want to have Linux as my operating system so I can learn how
> to use it properly by using it every day, and not having to change from
> Windows 2000 or XP to Linux at home.

Congratulations :o).

>
> I will be having a Linux laptop, Red hat 7.2, on a Think Pad A20m.  Real
> nice machine.
>
> I will be wanting to log on to a Windows NT 4 Domain and access network
> shares and documents, and printers.

Definitely possible. I've never gotten things working quite as smoothly as 
with real windows machines though. SMB filesystems tend to be a bit cranky at 
times. For instance if you detach from the network without unmounting them 
you're likely to cause a lockup. That being said, things generally work fine. 
Printing presents similar minor annoyances. I have my network set up so that 
the Linux boxes run CUPS locally and that prints to the remote windows print 
queue. 2 problems I've never solved: Errors are never reported, CUPS doesn't 
seem to notice if the smb print queue is broken, and more annoyingly it seems 
that smb has a bad memory leak or something involving printing. I regularly 
have to kill off errant smb processes that are associated with dead print 
jobs and grow to consume all memory. We use MDK 8.x here, so YMMV on that 
one. I've never really spent any effort trying to fix it since we don't do a 
large amount of printing.

You may find that the best approach is (if possible) to set up a Linux based 
file/print server. 

>
> I have installed the samba client.  I am downloading Open Office, and
> Java 1.4.
>
> I have a Palm Pilot that I will want to Synchronize with my Linux box.
> It runs in a USB Cradle ?? Is USB Palm supported under Linux ???

Yes, Linux supports serial, USB, and IR synching. Setting it up can be a bit 
tricky though.
>
> I have installed Red Hat, and put Xi-man gnome on it as I have heard
> that evolution will allow for access to an Exchange mail server and also
> allow calendaring and scheduling.
>
> At at later date, I will be wanting to make a HP PCMCIA CD burner work
> with Linux.  Some help or guidance on the Kernel compiling and the
> mounting statement would be handy.

I'm not really familiar with that particular hardware, but the general 
process with Linux and burners is that if they are ATAPI then you need to 
make sure your kernel supports SCSI and you have the options enabled for 
ATAPI/SCSI emulation (the reason being that ATAPI is really SCSI command set 
over ATA, so Linux has to be able to treat the ATAPI drive as a SCSI device) 
and then when you boot you have to give your kernel an ide-scsi=hdXa 
parameter (where X is whatever letter your drive is, usually a-d with onboard 
IDE). You can set that up in LILO or GRUB. I sometimes have problems with 
devfs interacting with that setup, again YMMV.
>
> I have a copy of Vmware if it turns out I absolutely have to have
> windows of some variety for a specific application.

VMWare is great. My A20p with 384 mb can run a 128mb VM with no sweat. Their 
docs on setting up networking are a bit hokey though. In my config I DON'T 
use "bridged" networking, instead I just set up the "local" configuration 
(which they claim only gives access to the host machine) and then created a 
NAT rule with iptables like so:

# Generated by iptables-save v1.2.4 on Tue Feb  5 16:54:35 2002
*nat
:PREROUTING ACCEPT [7:782]
:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [3:486]
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [6:972]
[8:780] -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
COMMIT

(you can use iptables-restore to invoke this, then save it as the permanent 
config using /etc/init.d/iptables save, then you just flag your system to 
start the iptables "service" on startup to have it restored automagically).

>
> I have some Linux experience, enough to do an install configure basic
> networking and printing, local printer, and some very basic text editing
> skills.  If anyone could suggest somewhere to go for some tips or hints
> on how to manage making Linux my desktop in a Windows environment, it
> would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully to respond.
>
> Cheers for now,

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