[Gibble]

Ok currently, the way my home network works, is I have a slack machine, acting as a router, and running apache, and a few other things...I attempted using jails to seperate everything, and while it worked...it's a pita to maintain. Behind this machine, on the network I have a wireless router as an access point. My knoppmythtv box (linux pvr) and my Windows PCs are on the wired network, while my windows laptop uses the wireless access point.

The reason I bring all this up in the UNIX/Linux area, is because this isn't about the networking... I am planning to rip out the slackware box, and just use the wireless router for all my computers, wired and wireless. Which frees up a PC. Since, I don't need it as a webserver (external hosting) as my development is done in a standalone system (WAMP) with the laptop.

Now, I want to use that PC, to create a fileshare on the network. Accessible by the windows machines and the linux (mythtv) machine, as well as external ftp connections. Samba, FTP, and whatever else I need for the linux machines to talk (NFS?). I would also like for this machine to be able to handle external USB drives, so I can quickly add storage as I have several of them, and centralizing them would be nice. Last, but not least, I'd like to run KDE or Gnome, or whatever and be able to use some form of vnc to manage this machine. And...yes, there's an and, as I was typing all this out, I've come to the conclusion I want to run my mythtv server on this as well...so I'm thinking fedora?

Should all this be possible?

[saikee]

Yes but you may have to experiement with a couple of Linux to find one best for the job.

A router cut out all the craps of a PC acting as a router and must be switch on all the time. A stand alone wireless router is easier because most of them give you 4 wired connections too and acts as a network gateway. None of your PC, be it a WIndows or a Linux, need a driver to connect to a router, except of course the PC's own network card.

You should be able to transfer your wired connections to the wireless router, get everything working more or less the same way as you are now, then experimenting the Slackware machine before changing or adding new OS to it.

[rob.rice]

look through the /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs on your slack machine this may help you work out just what you want to do
Yes you can do all of the above with slackware
slackware is heavy on networking tools and one of the simplest distros to set up
(most of the start up scripts for what you have discribed are alredy in /etc/rc.d/)

as far as mythtv I doubt you will find a precompiled package for slack BUT building from source will let you optimize it for your computer

[Gibble]

I'm not using slack. That machine is getting the boot It's running on bubble gum and toothpicks right now...

[rob.rice]

OK but if you did a full install on it the documentation is still there to tell you how to do what you want to do with linux
It's been so long sence I have used other distros I have forgoten where the HOWTOs are kept

Ok can that machine but do think about slack as your linux distro

another plsce for help is http://www.tldp.org/ BUT it can be hard to find just what your looking for there

Yet another veary good place for linux help is http://linuxquestions.org
that I know of there about 6 sysadmens that that reply to questions