Ever since the days of Red Hat 6.x, We have been tinkering around with getting the right blend of Linux and Windows in our network. Although Red Hat 6.x did not have an intuitive interface and the installation was not great, we have been able to utilize this OS in our company network - first as a PC in the work group with a shared printer then as a dual boot (Red Hat 9/ Win XP Pro) and ultimately as a samba server to a LAN of Win XP MC / Win XP Pro computers.

For more than two years we have been running a Fedora Core 8 / Win XP Pro dual boot (2 internal hard disk drives) workstation on our LAN and have recently converted it to a Fedora Core 8 samba server on our LAN. We are using the hard disk drive that contained Win XP Pro as a data drive:)

The conversion was easy after deciding how we were going to run our Windows based business financial package on a Linux platform - given the vendor does not currently support Linux. Then we discovered the Open Source wine package, installed this package and subsequently installed our finance software on the Fedora Core 8 workstation. Everything was running great but the network was not complete. Our next task would be to utilize a network drive for backups and file access (that is attached to our Fedora Core 8 workstation) and share information among our Windows network.

We elected to convert our Fedora Core 8 Linux workstation to a samba server by giving it an alias host name, configuring the smb.conf file for our work group and allowing in our LAN access for a complete and integrated Open Source network model of samba server (file server) with 3 Win XP Pro clients, a Fedora Core 8 local printer and a Windows network printer.

At the time of writing we are very happy with this installation and have integrated a wireless weather station, wireless Xbox 360 and wireless PSP to complete our media fix.

Listed below is our Fedora Core 8 samba server (2 dual Xeon processors, 2 GB memory, 2 internal hard disk drives, 2 optical drives)