Lormalinux

Lormalinux is touted as a distro tailored for the education field. What brought it to my attention was my Google search "linux distro preconfigured for samba". It was the first link returned.

Based on Slackware, they offer several configurations, including Samba server, Web/MySQL server, and LTSP server (no idea what that means). I downloaded the Samba version (beta 2) and gave it a try.

Right away, I was surprised by the harshness of the Slackware install. I've been spoiled by Mandrake (now Mandriva), Ubuntu, RedHat and Fedora and their handholding installs. I kind of laughed when, after reading on the web site that this distro is easy for newbies, the installation dropped to a login prompt telling me to partition the drives myself, and then start setup. Now, I've partitioned drives before, but I still had to spend a little time in the help files to figure out what they wanted (every distro seems to be different). I can't imagine a well-intentioned high school English teacher trying to setup a server for his classes being able to do this without help.

Anyway, I then was able to finish the install. In my role as the English teaching newbie, I took almost all defaults and installed the full distro as recommended. (Since I am a method actor, my grammar was impeccable throughout.)

A quick reboot, and I was presented with a character-based login (as I had hoped). I fired up the computer search in Windows and found the machine by hostname without incident, and was able to connect to the default share. After I modified smb.conf to update the workgroup, I could see it in the workgroup computers list.

Next, I fired up the WebAdmin interface included with the distro. It is found on port 10000. It has come up, and my next trick is to configure Samba for my use.

Wish me luck.