Network made easy with Mandriva

At my office, I decided to install Mandriva because I got tired of waiting for XP to load and the antivirus ritual made me waste a lot of valuable time.

However, I had a problem: the three computers in the office were part of a network and I could not share resources with my co-workers because I did not know how to see their computers.

I remember I tried to install a home network in XP once. Following the assistant, I had to copy some files in some removable media and install them on the other computers, etc. but I never got the process working. This failure made me a little shy. After all, if one cannot set up a home network in XP, doing it in Linux is impossible, right? Wrong! I discovered yesterday that I do not have to do anything beyond the ordinary for a simple computer user; it is only a matter of knowing where to go and having the login information. Yes, Mandriva saw the other computers all the time and I did not know!

All I had to do was to open MCC, go to Shared Resources, access Windows Shared Resources, and then hit Search servers. All the available servers in the faculty were displayed. Then I merely opened Dolphin, went to Network, and then to Samba Shares to locate the appropriate computers in my network.

Once there, I entered the login and password of the Windows users and... PRESTO!
I was able to share files with the Windows computers.
If I had known before this was so easy to do in Linux...

The funny thing is that the "powerful" Windows 7 computer is constantly having connectivity problems and, occasionally, fails to see the XP computer. My station (the computer running Mandriva 2010.2, of course) has access to both Windows computers and their resources, but their malware does not have access to my system ;-)