newbie questions starting out. seting network, 2 machines and internet sharing, samba, etc..

From: Trevor (trevorjm_at_myaccess.com.au)
Date: 08/14/05 

Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 16:49:47 +1000

Hi;

        I have 2 computers, laptop running XP Pro, and
        main Tower running 2 hard drives.

        The main tower is my problem.

        I have 2 Hard drives. win XP on second drive 250 gig,
        Fedora core 4 on main drive 130gig. Bios is able to change
        boot order, but thats a thing as Grub is now able
        to boot to either os.

        My first issue is what things do I need to setup
        and in what order to fill the following needs.

        Tower is going to be the internet connection,
        so I need to be able to allow the windows equivalent
        of internet sharing.

        I also want to be able to access the windows drive on the
        Tower from other machines on the network. ie Laptop.
        From what I gather Samba is the program here.
        The Windows drive is partitioned as NTFS c: and Fat32 d:

        And I want Linux to be able to "take over" the laptop,
        the equivalent of windows remote desktop.

        So my questions are.

        1. What is the best install of Fedora 4 to easily achieve
                all this options. Workstation / Server .....

        2. Can I do Workstation and then add the relevant programs.
        
        3. Do I need to run NIS (what is it.)

        4. DHCP. The Tower is going to be the DHCP server as well,
                does it have to have the network card setup with its own
                ip address on bootup, or is it able to be setup with
                a DHCP address from the DHCP server.

        5. What other programs do I need to install, and in what order.

        6. What is/are some good books/internet sites, that will
                help understand all the above.

        I feel the network is my biggest issue, getting that running
        properly I think is the key to all the above. The network is
        all cables, initially there are only 2 machines Tower & Laptop,
        they are connected via a cross over cable, (just whilst setting
        all up) then it will run through a network box, allowing other
        machines to connect to network and Internet.

Trevor..