A couple of n00b Fedora Linux questions

Factual Questions
1

I’m setting up a system with Fedora for a project at work. If this was an OS I was experienced in, such as VMS or Windoze, I would have no problems doing what I need.

  1. How do I get out of the (X-?)window display to access the BASH command line?

  2. I cannot see the ofther systems on the small network I’m using, and I presume it’s because I need to name the network domain. How do I do this?

2

Found the answer to 1): Use the ‘Terminal’ option from the tool bar.

3

First, did your Fedora box get on the network? I imagine without any other configuration it tried DHCP. No DHCP? You’ll have to set up the IP, gw, etc in
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 (where ethN is your NIC).

Some commands (as root in a terminal):
ifconfig - show you the status of your network interface (similar to ipconfig in windows)
/etc/init.d/network status or /etc/init.d/network restart (network daemon - status of network interface, restart interface)

If you got an ip address, can you ping any of the other boxes? Do you have DNS on the network? The file /etc/resolve.conf should point to your DNS or you can specify these directly in /etc/hosts

Finally, what’s the rest of your network running? If you are trying to hit a windows share look into SAMBA/CIFS. Other linux boxes? NFS, all the way.

To mount a windows share its:

mount -t smbfs -o workgroup=domain,username=tridge,password=foobar //fjall/test /data/test

Fedora probably has GUIs to do a lot of this, but I don’t know them.

4

You usually don’t want to, but you can type Ctrl-Alt-F1. Type Alt-F7 to get back to the GUI. (And the graphical environment is just called X. People who call it X-Windows are parading their ignorance.) Opening up a terminal window is usually a better way of doing what you want: Unlike in DOS, there is really no such thing as a full-screen console application in Linux.

Fedora should have graphical tools to do what you want by now. Poke around in the System menu or similar (I haven’t used Fedora since Fedora Core 5 and that’s been years now).

5

Before I saw the other replies, I stumbled across Samba on my own, and I’ll try it tomorrow.

The network is an isolated setup, with WinXP and Linux boxes on it. I want the Linux development box to act like Win network because I have lots of data to move both ways in the forseeable future.