sharing data btwn Win & linux

[jdbucky]

Just starting in linux and have lots of questions but few answers.
Can linux read Win data files ie does linux open officeread .doc files created with word?
does Ubuntu 6.06 read files stored on an NTFS drive?
I have a 160 GB drive formated to NTFS. Do I have to reformat to FAT32 to store data files created by linux? If so, How?

[KilluminatiStyle]

Hi, welcome to the forums.

I just started using Ubuntu 2 days ago and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

I haven't tried to open any MS Office created documents with OpenOffice yet but from what I've read on their website it fully supports this.

Ubuntu can indeed read NTFS drives but not unless you do some things first. I had a heck of a time getting my NTFS drive to work simply because I kept coming up with TONS of errors when trying to install all of the required packages to do so. Then I found out about this VERY HANDY little app called AUTOMATIX. Within this app there is an option to install NTFS READ/WRITE support. This is done by using a fairly new utility called NTFS-3g. So far this thing is working great! I'm running uTorrent under WINE (there are several good torrent apps for linux but they all lack one feature that I love... move completed files.. Azureus for Linux does this but AZ is such a resource hog it isn't funny) and I have all of my downloads set to my NTFS drive and I haven't had a single issue yet. Granted it's only been 2 days but hey.

Don't give up on ubuntu. It took some time for me to figure out how to even play MP3's (hint AUTOMATIX hint).

Google is your friend. 90% of all of my questions have been answered either on google or on ubuntu wiki forums.

Good luck!

[Kareeser]

Just for the record, I've temporarily given up on Unix...

But I hear good things about Samba!

[KilluminatiStyle]

The SAMBA sharing in Ubuntu works just fine. Windows can see my shared NTFS drive on my Ubuntu box and Ubuntu can see my shared drives on my XP box. Having full read/write access for NTFS in lunux is kind of a new thing I guess. There have been packages in the past that have done this but I guess non of them did it very will. NTFS-3g is working FLAWLESSLY thus far and I don't forsee any problems at all.

I'm currently encoding DVD Video with TMPGEnc under WINE. The video is stored and being output to my NTFS drive.

[rhysox]

NTFS support can be built into the kernel, thus you don't need ANY other applications to be able to use an NTFS disk/partition. Linux uses many different file systems, most commonly ext2/3/4 and reiserfs, NOT FAT32, although this support can also be built in so that hard disks formatted in this style of partition can be read/written to.

Free software tools such as openoffice can be downloaded free of charge and are very good at handling office documents, and are all multiplatform compatible, e.g. Word documents can be moved between operating systems without any loss in format/data.

Azerus is a resource hog because in runs on the JVM (Java virtual machine), try giving this a higher priority and it may run a bit nicer

Hope this answers some of your questions, let me know if you need any more explanations as to kernel support etc.

[LeftyAce]

To get ntfs read/write support in ubuntu, install the ntfs3g driver through apt. Works great for me, and no kernel compiling necessary.

[rhysox]

why use a third party ntfs driver when a native one can be built into the kernel, which will more than likely be a lot quicker and cleaner?