[KLUG Members] Adding a Laptop To My Network

[Adam Tauno Williams]

Well, thanks to the bloated public school system I'm now adding a Dell
Lattitude Cpt to my home network.  So far I'm pretty impressed with it,
despite the fact that laptops have notoriously sludgy I/O.  fips20
happily shrunk the Win9x parition, and BS-Ware PRO virutally leapt onto
the harddrive.  X-Free, sound, etc... all worked straight away,  I never
touched a config file.  I plopped in a PCMCIA ethernet card (D-Link,
$48, which says it supports Redhat right on the box) and told control
panel to use DHCP, and I was on the net.  Whew,  that was too hard. :)

The primary used of this laptop will be my wifal unit (to borrow a
Gettig phrase).  This means everything "just has to work",  no command
line, nothing should ever crash "'cause this is Linux, right?".  She
spends her time between Star Office, Web browser, and GnuCash.  

What I need to find is a EASY TO USE GUI file transfer mechanism.  She
has mountains of files on our server,  which gets backed up.  So she'll
need to be able to get and put files from her home directory on the
server to her home directory on the laptop.  

The sever has tftp, NFS, Kerberos V, apache, php, ssh, telnet, and
sendmail installed and running.  I'm thinking that a GUI front end to
SSH might be the best approach,  but I also have rsync (which I've never
used), and just want to know if anyone has approached this problem and
what the BEST solution is.  If I come up with something now, and change
it in two weeks, my user base will be displeased.

I've already found out that Redhat's PPP dialer applett is just as happy
turning eth0 on and off as a PPP interface.  (This is Ximian GNOME,
BTW).