Ubuntu and XP on same home network

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I have two PCs on a home network and am considering installing Ubuntu on the old clunker (and leaving the other on XP). If I do that, will the home network still work and will each PC still be able to see and copy each other’s files? Also, the printer hangs off the XP machine, so will the Ubuntu PC still be able to use it?

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I have my netbook (Ubuntu) sharing a drive on my XP desktop, so that works. Not sure about the printer, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t as long as you can find Linux drivers.

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You might be able to find your answers at this Ubuntu.com “Community” page.

For the most part, Ubuntu, and the other distributions based upon it, will setup nicely with your current hardware. There are still some items that will cause you headaches, but if you’re willing to invest a bit of time and effort, you’ll learn so much more.

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I put ubuntu 9.1 on an old Dell latitude. It hooked up to my shared XP folders and printer without issue. Basically the same approach on ubuntu as XP for adding network devices.

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I have two PCs on a home network and am considering installing Ubuntu on the old clunker (and leaving the other on XP). If I do that, will the home network still work and will each PC still be able to see and copy each other’s files? Also, the printer hangs off the XP machine, so will the Ubuntu PC still be able to use it?

Yes, and no. The Network will work fine. I always edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to make sure the WORKGROUP matches whatever I use on the Windows side. You might have to add Samba client or server capability depending on what you want to do. You can do this through the “Add Programs” tool. You can share Linux folders using the Share folder tool in Ubuntu. But…although Linux will see the Windows folders and files just fine, Windows will not be able to read the Linux filesystem if you used ext3 or ext4 to format your drive. I have an external USB drive formatted to NTFS that I share on the Linux side – that way I can park files there if needed by Windows. All my music is on that drive, so Windows Media Player can access that over the LAN.

Ubuntu has pretty good printer setup now – you should be able to find the printer as a network printer as long as it is a Windows share.

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…although Linux will see the Windows folders and files just fine, Windows will not be able to read the Linux filesystem if you used ext3 or ext4 to format your drive.

Although true when using a Windows OS to read a local disk, this statement is untrue for accessing a network location, as would be the case of the original question.

When made available for network access, the filesystem used on the drive only needs to be understood by the host OS. The remote OS handles the network location.

It all depends on the type of share you make available. For example, a Samba share for using Microsoft Windows as the remote system.

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Similar to what Ian said, you can also set up a FAT partition (on your hard drive or an external drive) for files and folders you want to share between the two OSes. Linux and Windows can then both access the files and folders on this partition. This is the way I set up a dual boot laptop with XP Pro and Ubuntu 9.10. I actually also set up Kubuntu on the same laptop to play with the KDE version of Ubuntu. So I set uip 1) an XP partition; 2) a FAT32 partition; and 3) an extended Linux partition that contains both Linux OSes, /home partitions for them, and a swap partition. I also have 4) a fourth partition for BootIt NG that makes working with partitions easy (and image backups as well) thanks to Fred Langa’s tips!
They all three (XP, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu) work with the FAT32 partition that contains all my documents, photos, etc, that I may want to access from any OS.
I had no issues with printing from Linux.

Hope that helps.

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Samba does wonders for me. (file sharing on a mixed network of Win, Linux boxes).

Win XP finds a Samba share on my network faster than it (the Win XP) finds another Windows box.

I run Slackware (Linux distro), use it as a desktop and also as a server.

I back up Win boxes to my Slackware box via my network.

I’ve a Samba set up on my Slackware box with a rule in the iptables firewall so that my local network boxes can access/use (get in to the) said Samba shares (2 shared folders).
—————–

You’d need to share your printer onto the network.

and then,

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/network-printer-between-2-linux-computers-with-samba-and-cups.-757387/#post3696430

that’s my (acummings) post. *All* of my printers are network printers.

lpd works well for me in my case.

For an example of lpd -> at above url, take a look at my working printers.conf file

DeviceURI

The line that begins with the above is it! How simple it is using lpd

More Linux network printing tips/howto also are in that thread.

Further cups helps:

http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:cups

—
Alan.

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As others have said, SAMBA makes access over the network pretty easy.

What you may not be aware of is that if you are dual-booting XP and Linux, there are various utilities that will give XP read-only access to files on the Linux partitions if they are using EXT2 or EXT3 (I don’t know offhand if they’ll work with EXT4).

David

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I run Ubuntu 8.04 on my Dell box and XP on my antec build, I also have two HP Pavillions running Vista. I can see them all and I can write files to the NTFS disks, and the Windows machines can write files to my Ubuntu machine. You do need to download a small driver so that the Windows machines can write to Linux disks, can’t remember the name of the file right now (did it about a year ago), but it is free. Check the Ubuntu Community at http://ubuntuforums.org/

I have not seen any problems with the having a Linux box in the network. On the Linux side, I do use samba (smb4k).

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