Although Mac OS X is BSD under the hood, and so not dissimilar to Linux, I don't really have much experience with it and she (the graphic designer) is not technical at all. I don't want to waste the first hour fiddling around trying to
set things up so that we can easily share files
MacOS X comes with samba (smbd) already setup, but it needs to be turned on. (Client is always ready to use.) On the MacOS X machine open the System Preferences. (Go to the Dock and click on the icon that's an off-white rectangle with what looks like a light switch and a gray apple side-by-side.) When that opens, click on the Sharing icon (looks like a folder with a yellow diamond on it. Actually the diamond looks like a Pedestrian Crossing sign--don't ask me what the connection is!). Once that's open there will be a list of services that can be turned on or off down the left side. These include:
"Personal File Sharing" -> AppleTalk server
"Windows Sharing" -> smbd
"Remote Login" -> sshd
"FTP access" -> ftpd
When Windows Sharing is on and selected there is a message across the bottom that tells you how to connect back to the machine. E.g., mine right now says: "Windows users can access your computer at \\192.168.1.102\mcswgn".
Pre MacOS 10.3 you had to reset the users password in order to use smb to connect to the computer after turning Windows sharing on. (I presume this was because only the unix encrypted password was saved and not the LM/NT passwords, so these would have to be generated.) I don't see the same under 10.3, so maybe these are saved right from the start now. If she is running an earlier version of MacOS X, though, go to the Accounts in System preferences (same place as you found Sharing--it might have been called Users in earlier versions) and check mark the box that says something like "Allow this user to connect from Windows". This is where it would tell you to re-enter the password. Note it does not need to be changed, just retyped.
Any of the above services would allow you to connect from your machine to hers (with the appropriate protocol). In some ways the FTP access might be the easiest. Particularly if you have a nice GUI FTP client on your machine. If you want to go the other way and have smbd running on your machine, she should see your machine on the network. If not, she would go to the "Go" menu (from the Finder) -> "Connect to Server...", and use the syntax smb://192.168.1.102/mcswgn (to use the example above. Note the forward slashes). Or use ftp://.... for FTP access. Either would make your machine appear as another disk on her computer (so files can be transfered by drag and drop).
Of course, you can also ftp, etc. from the command line, but I didn't think that might be as good if the other person is not technically savvy.
-- Patrick D. McSwiggen pat.mcswiggen@xxxxxx Mathematical Sciences 513-556-4080 University of Cincinnati 513-556-3417 FAX
