Re: Samba and NFS need some explanations.

Ivan,

The reason 'they' don't make everything compatible is because 'they' include a company like Microsoft that does everything it can to make things difficult to do this.  However the SAMBA folks make it easy enough to overcome all of that. 

I agree with what is said, you can run a Samba server and it will basically let your linux box suddenly appear in your 'Network Places' area of your XP box.  You will then be able to go onto your windows box and set up a 'mapped network drive'.  You can do this by going into Tools -->map network drive, or you can right click on 'my computer' and if your samba is set up it will see the shares from the linux machine. 

Note that you are not (normally) sharing the whole linux box - just choose a *part* of the filesystem, such as /home.   If you have a red hat or fedora machine with the gui, you can probably set it up in there pretty easily.  Keep in mind that you also have to make the share be seen 'as' something.  This is basically saying that, in the linux filesystem, /home is now going to be 'seen' as some other name, like testshare or something like that.  The main samba configuration file is /etc/samba/smb.conf   - like I said you might want to configure it through the desktop since one little mistake might make it hard to troubleshoot until you get more familiar with it as well as the windows part of it.

Linuxmigration.com has a pretty good introduction to Samba.  In my opinion, Samba is all you really need for your situation.  Good luck

Marc