August Dvorak invented the alternate Dvorak keyboard in an attempt to reduce the learning time for learning touch-typing, and to reduce the ‘distance that the fingers had to travel for doing the same amount of typing. The fingers have to travel2D times less on a Dvorak keyboard! The main reason is that the most commonly typed keys are immediately under the fingers (rather than in the Qwerty, where you have to move away often from the home keysasdf and ;Ikj. When using any typing software, the very first time you have to specify the keyboard layout (QWERTY or Dvorak) that you wish to work with.
With Dvorak, one should be able to reduce the learning time considerably. And guess what? Windows allows to you change the layout of your keyboard to Dvorak! In Windows XP, go to ‘Control panel I Regional Languages and Options I Languages I Details I Installed Services I Add |Input language (US English) and Layout (Dvorak)’. This brings out a small keyboard icon in the taskbar called the Language bar. You can now right-click this icon to obtain the choices for the Qwerty or the Dvorak keyboard. (In Windows 95/98/Me/20DO go to ‘Control panel’, double-click ‘Keyboard I Language Tab I Properties I United States Dvorak’)
Today is the last post of our Windows and Linux interconnection over a network. We start from where we left last time
3 Mount –t smbfs –o username = “<username>”, password = “<password>” //<Hostname>/<Share Name> /mnt/sambashare:
This command mounts the windows share onto the Linux filesystem in the /mnt/sambashare folder. Replace this with the location where you wa nt to mount it. It is very similarto mounting a CD-ROM or floppy.
The other way of LAN browsing is using a GUI-based application that resembles Windows Network Neighborhood. The simplest way to have GUI-based LAN browsing is to use Konqueror in KDE. Just type the location in the address bar with a smb:// prefiX.
Smb://<Hostname>/<Share Name>
An authentication window will pop up to ask your username and password. Provide it and you are in. There are scores of GUI interfaces available at http://us1.samba.org/sambalGUII. Pick the one you like best. The popular ones are Webmin and Komba2. But I love Linneighborhood–it is supposedly a port of the Windows Network Neighborhood and looks exactly like the real McCoy.
Read the SAMBA documentation on the website and if that is not enough, buy a book called Using SAMBA by Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown and Peter Kelly from O’Reilly Press. And of course as always, have fun.
All that remains is a way of accessing the shared files and folders over the workgroup network. Accessing Linux shares from Windows is pretty straightforward: your Linux SAMBA server is available in the Windows Network Neighborhood. Access it just like you would access a Windows machine on the network.
But accessing Windows shared folders within Linux is not that simple. There are two ways of doing this: first, the command prompt way a la UNIX. Here are some commands for the select few who think GUls are a pain.
1. 5mbclient L Hostname –U
Username: This command will display all the Windows shared resources available on the network. Hostname is the name of the Windows Pc. Alternatively, you can replace it with its IP address if DNS does not work. Username is a valid SAMBA user created using smbpasswd.
2. 5mbclient \\\\<Hostname>\\<Share Name> <Password>:
This command will connect to the shared resource on the specified host. Due to shell restrictions, the backs lashes are escaped using extra backslashes. This command will result in a FTP like 5MB prompt.
SMB> type H for commands to access files and folders which include standard file handling such as copy, cut, rename, delete, etc.
The Windows configuration is pretty simple. In fact, it is as easy as adding a new machine to a workgroup.
On a XP Professional machine, click on the ‘My Computer I Properties I Computer Name’tab to name the machine and add it to the workgroup. In my case, the workgroup is Aquanova and the name of the machine is Darkstar.
Next, right-click on the ‘LAN connection’ icon in ‘My Network Places’to bring up the ‘TCP/IP properties’ dialog box. Make sure that ‘Client for Microsoft Networks’ and ‘File and Printer sharing for Microsoft Networks’ are enabled.
Select TCP|IP, click on ‘Properties I Advanced’ and add the IP address of the Linux box in the WINS tab. In my case it is 192.168.0.20. Also enable NetBIOS over TCP!IP.
Note for Windows XP Professional users:
Make the following changes to your registry using the regedit command in ‘Start I Run’ and reboot before continuing:
Navigate to the key string
‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\Services \Netlogon \Parameters’.
Change the dword value of ‘requiresignorseal’ to 00000000.
For ’signsecurechannel’, change the dword value to 00000000.
Well, Colin Farrell was super cool in the movie SWAT, but this baby has nothing to do with crime prevention. SWAT stands for SAMBA Web Administration Tool. It facilitates the easy creation ofthe smb.conffile and remote server configuration for network administrators. For the beginner or novice enthusiast, steps 3 and 4 above can be done effortlessly with SWAT.
SWAT needs to be installed, as it is not done by default. You will find it in one of the setup CDs of your distribution. The startup is slightly tricky, so I will try to put it very simply. Once the SWAT RPM is installed, do the following:
Add the following block to a file called ‘xinetd.conf’ in /etc
Service swat
{
Socket type = stream
Protocols = tcp
Wait = no
User = root
Server = /usrl/sbin/swat }
Add the following line to a file called ’services’ in /etc under # Local Services swat 901/tcp
Restart the ‘xinetd’ service with the command:
# Service xinted restart
Point your web browser to http://localhost:901.A login authentication dialog will pop up. Remember that only a root user can access SWAT as specified in the xinted.conf file. You can also use the name of the machine in the place of localhost if it doesn’t work.
