Is it straight forward to have a linux machine access the data held on a PC running Windows?
I’m thinking of buying my partner a Netbook, all she wants it for is to access the internet, check her email and facebook etc but she would also like to transfer a few movies from our home PC occasionally to watch when she is out and about.
Can I set it so she can access our home PC and copy files to her Netbook via our wireless router when one is on Windows and the other is Linux?
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I’m not sure what you mean by “access our home PC,” but it shouldn’t be a problem.
Linux can’t access an NTFS partition (proprietary),which is what windows uses. You’ll have to make an FAT partition for any files that you want to use in both Linux and Windows.
@eambos
The external HDD on our home system is FAT32.
Will she still be able to access it via the windows machine it is connected to?
You can also set up Apache on the Linux computer and get to the files that way. So it would use the web browser to find stuff.
Yeap, you can use samba share in linux which is the windows protocol for file sharing(among other things). Most GNU/linux distros have already installed it but if not it can be installed very easily :). Just send me a message with the name of the distro and Ill tell you how :). Good luck buying the netbook.
I have an 10” EE notebook for use with my cameras (tethered shooting) and have no problem with using it on either the home or office cross platform MAC/PC network. They are great little toys.
@eambos Linux can access any file format, I use Ubuntu 8.10 and I can access my Vista partition fully…if your dual booting simply click Places>Computer…there you will see a bunch of drives ‘File System’ is Linux’s there will be one which is just a size, on mine its 125gb half of my HD because Ubuntu gets half and Vista the other…double click it and it will ask you for your user password enter click ok and your in…you can even drop a file in to the desktop of Windows and when you go into it next time it will appear there…
If you regularly switch between the two Ild recommend www.getdropbox.com use it on both machines and it sync’s up to 2gb free and will sync to as many other computers such as a netbook as you like! :)
I promise you I know Linux well it has been made to access any file system its access’s read+write to my usb stick which is NTFS, even a Mac can only read from NTFS
On my dual boot of Vista and 8.04, it won’t let me access the NTFS partition from ubuntu nor the Ext3 from Vista. I had to use a 20gb FAT parition for amy files I wanted to use in both.
When I was dual-booting 8.10 an XP, I had read+write privileges on the XP partition.
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