This has been a spur of the moment descision to make this. I though i could use it to get some of the frustration off my chest about making the switch to linux on my work computer.
I first made the switch about a week ago, so there is alot of catching up to do.
The domain controller on my network is a red-hat based distro called SME server so i thought it would be good to use a red-hat distro for my own machine so that skills could be transferred. So i downloaded and installed FC3.
The install went perfectly as i dont have any unusual hardware. I put in a different hdd so that i still had my windows drive if everything went wrong. That was pretty much the only thing during the install that required thinking about. The linux installer is very good.
So ive got a new install on my machine now i have to try and make it do the things that i was doing with windows.
Internet: Obviously the first thing i needed was internet access and using firefox which is built in to the distro this was identical to the windows version, although the settings part is under 'edit' instead of 'tools'. I made the changes tot he proxy configuration and everything was sweet.
Remote Desktop Admin: Again this was easy, FC3 comes with a utility called 'krdc' which is called 'Remote Desktop Connection' in the 'start' menu under internet. So i had all my vnc needs covered.
Email: This was a bastard. I used thunderbird under windows and had all the emails and settings stored on the network, so i wanted my new thunderbird to use those aswell. The problem here is that using linux on the network frustrates that crap out of me because so many thing that should be straight forward are not.
For example, in windows to map a new network drive you go to the drive under my network places and right click and tell it what letter and its done. Under linux you can sort of do the same thing by using nautilus to navigate the network, but when you get to the share you want what do you do now ? (as i write this i just went to the lan browser to remember how describe what i was writing and my 'lisa demon' has stopped working ..)
Anyway it wasnt intuitive so i had a search around and its not easy to find, there are a billion and one sites describing how to connect to a fat32 or ntfs partition (ntfs support is still only considered safe for read-only) but not how to connect to a share on a linux partition. I thought surely you can use the same command to mount the linux partition that these people are using to mount the ntfs partition but with a differetn filesystem specified. At this point i'd like to ask you what file system does linux use ?
Those of you who have installed linux before will say ext2 or ext3 because when you installed linux and did the partitioning part this is what it told you, and you are right. But apparently that does not work over the network. So i had a hell of a time working out whatfilesystem to specify. (it ended up being cifs)
So now ive got my remote shares happening, but as soon as i try to write to one of the shares it says access denied. So i had to search around even more to find out how to give myself write access to the shares. More stuffing around.
Anyway now they all work, they are even in the fstab file so that i dont have to manually mount them each time i restarted the machine. So my email was finally working, yay.
I'll write some more later.
