Imagine that you are visiting a foreign country. When you arrive, you need to acclimatize to the weather, change your clock to the local hour, and slowly adapt to the country's protocols and rules. In other words, we need to "integrate" our behavior with that of the foreign country. For information systems like PCs, Mainframes, and Workstations that run a variety of operating system, the problem is the same.

Connection protocols such as TCP/IP, AppleTalk, NETBEUI, IPX and others are merely methods to share information between machines. The job of the "System Integrator" is to configure the necessary files to create a dialog between different operating systems so that they can share disks, print jobs, and other operations between different machines.

In a heterogeneous network as shown in the figure, each computer has a different operating system, with different protocols and working methods. For example, the iMAC from Apple, is mainly used for publishing purposes in a graphical environment, and uses the proprietary AppleTalk network protocol which was developed for communication among Apple machines. Additionally, these systems later added the TCP/IP protocol, which is a standard for Intranet and Internet networks.

This means that on a Macintosh, it would be very difficult to see a window with a command line, which is what commonly happens on Linux, UNIX and DOS. The MS-Windows, on the other hand, has evolved from a D.O.S. (Disk Operating System) which manages system devices by listing them with letters of the alphabet. A: and B: are floppy disks, and C: through Z: are reserved for hard disks, removable disks, DVD-RAM, PD, or network disks. In this system, NETBEUI is the protocol which is commonly used. It is a very simple, Microsoft proprietary communication protocol, originally created to work onoly with MS-Windows 3.X.

The Novell Server was created as a network operating system, but with a client-server architecture. The protocol used hre is IPX (Internet Packet Exchange). Conceived by Novell, this is a simple and unique protocol. These servers have always created a standard for power and stability in networks. Novell's success has forced other companies to develop drivers to integrate Novell protocols into their own networks. For example, MS-Windows supports IPX.

The UNIX systems, created by the AT&T at Bell Laboratories, and also redefined by the University of California at Berkeley, have generated various commercial variants present in the current market. IBM, Sun, HP, Silicon Graphics, and others, each have their own dialect, unique and proprietary, but they all share a common network protocol: TCP/IP.

Linux, as a multi-protocol Unix clone, can be integrated with any of the previously listed operating systems. Linux's flexibility is based on the "open" philosophy which allows anyone to develop software or protocols that connect to other networks. Linux can connect to MS-Windows, Apple, or even minicomputers like IBM AS/400 systems.

One of these communications systems is SAMBA, which integrates Linux and MS-Windows in a simple manner. This system is so popular that the most important Linux Distributions (Caldera, SuSE, and others) support the installation of the SAMBA protocol, also called SMB. To use SAMBA, the installation CD must be available on the MS-Windows machine. The Linux installation program loads and transfers the software from the CD to the Linux machine over the network.

This course was developed to give details about the various operating systems present in the market, and how to communicate and share information among them. The course is very technical, and positions Linux at the center of these "worlds."

Some Linux distributions have better integration for one particular type of network. For example, Caldera OpenLinux provides Caldera Network Desktop. It lets you manage a Novell Netware server from the Linux desktop. You can add users, change passwords, send jobs to netware printers, moutn Netware servers and volumes; all in just seconds after the installation is complete. Furthermore, Caldera offers "Caldera NetWare for Linux", a product which can transform a Linux server into a Novell server 4.10b

In many cases, this course offers step-by-step methods to solve a specific problem, such as: "How to run Linux graphic applications on a Apple MacOS".

In the appendix we list the various network commands and include a list of all products that can help us to quickly solve difficult integration problems.

Good Integration!