Beginner Asking for Advice

[Florence1550]

Hi I work for a small but successful law firm and incharge of the IT side amongst others. We are using a win2000 P2P Network at pressent and I was wonderaing and have always been interested in Linux Mainly because of the lack of the BIG "M" and the pricing of there products.
This is what I want to do with linux and was wondering of the complexities. I want a Linux based Server with File Shares so I can keep documents. which are then used by the win2000 workstations, (I can't retrain all the old cronies to use a new wordprocessor). I want to move our Mailserver from our ISP to us so we have more control. I want to add webpageing later but I need to implement at some stage VPN so Teleworkers can Log onto the fileserver and Edit Documents as though they were on the network without all this do you want to download etc. They have to be able to open a word or Spreedsheet from where thay are, Change and then say print to the office printer as though they were at the Office is all this possible with Linux and on one machine.

[sarumont]

First off, welcome to the boards.

And on to business...

You could set up a Linux box to be a samba or ftp server for file sharing between Windoze boxen and the Linux server.

Mail servers are plentiful and documentation on them is everywhere. Setting one up would be not a problem.

As for letting users log in from other places and print in the office, that may be a little harder to implement with a windows box. The only things I can think of are a remote shell (sshd and putty) or maybe VNC. Alternatively, I believe you can share the printer over the Internet and have it password protected.

Hope this helps some.

[Florence1550]

Which is the best Linux i'm torn bewtween either Red hat or Mandrake latest editions due to the hardware support and admin updates.

[sarumont]

It really comes down to personal preference. I'd experiment with both of them (and possibly even more distros...) and see which one is the best for the applications that you want it for.