I have two main computers at my desk. An old P4 2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, and a moderate video card, running Windows XP, and a new Mini-ITX motherboard with onboard 1GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM, and onboard graphics running Arch Linux and KDE-mod (this system is built into an old NES case ).

I had just finished customizing my Arch box (Lintendo ), and I shut off both computers so I could see how fast each of them go from POST to login screen. All of a sudden my Windows PC gets a BSoD telling me that Ntfs.sys is corrupt. I know this could be a sign of a hard drive failure, but somehow I doubt it. Now, I mostly used this PC for things like Photoshop, Steam, and VMWare, but I know that with Wine and Linux, I should be able to use both Photoshop and Steam, and get a Linux native VMWare.

This might be the last chance Windows had for personal computing, as this PC was already the only PC in my house still running Windows out of about 4 computers I use on a regular basis (though there are about 18 total in my house, counting all of the old desktops/servers sitting in the closet, but I would probably use Linux on them, too).

The only other use I had for the Windows PC was SMB file sharing. I know there is Samba in Linux, but I have also heard about NFS. Any suggestions?

I would go for the Samba option, that way you can share file to Windows PCs as well as Linux servers and it allows fine grained access control

The most widely used version of NFS is V3, which is looking sorely out of date in my opinion. It still generally relies upon host-based authentication by making shares available to a given IP address. Has anyone has experience using NFSv4 I'd like to know if it's better/easier/more secure.

Jimbob