How do you set up a Linux file server for two Windows clients?

[Wyoming]

As you may have guessed from the title, this Christmas I'm planning to set up a network with a Linux file server and two Windows clients. One running XP home and one running Windows ME (If more information is needed I will try to supply it).

Are there any guides for doing such a thing? As some of you may have gleaned from previous posts, I'm not what you'd call computer literate and I'd like to be walked through this step-by-step if possible and thus I'm searching for a guide.

Thanks in advance.

[Xaneden]

Hmm, well you could try using a piece of software like Samba to simplify the process:

http://us4.samba.org/samba

It also provides quite a bit of info and documentation, however you'd need to set Linux up yourself (which I'm assuming you can do?).

[Dougal]

The easiest way is to get teh Linux file sharing tools for windows.

Called Services for Unix takes a lot of hassle out of the windows side

[Xaneden]

Congratulations on the 1000 posts Dougal

[herulach]

Id say samba is prob easier to set up, 3 or four lines in the config file and it should be seamless, it actually makes our networ run better with the samba machine on, dont seem to get the random permission denied errors and machines going all xenophobic.

[noTHINGface]

I'd agree with that, Samba is easy to set up and with a modern distro you can configure using a GUI, no more messing with smb.conf.