I'd like to be able to transfer files between two computers DIRECTLY instead of having to use USB drives or CDs. How do I do this? I haven't done home networking in ANY OS, Linux or Windows.

Do I need any additional hardware, or can I do it with just an Ethernet cable?

What software do I need?

You could ftp from a terminal or you could try gftp which has a gui. I'm not sure if it's included in 8.5 and I can't check right now since I'm running 8.2. The gui is very friendly and works very well.

EDIT: In either case, you need to know the other machine's ip address so that you can use it to ftp (of gftp) and then you'll log in using that machine's login and password.

Smallnetbuilder.com has some great articles if you are starting from scratch. My set up at home (4 computers, various OS's) uses a wireless router with built in switch. All the machines connect to this either via a wired ethernet connection or a wireless connection. The router assigns the IP addresses.

Here's a link. Its an older article, and maybe overkill, but its good none-the-less.

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Once you have your machines physically connected in a network, you can set up file shares. I use smbnetfs to browse the windows shares on my media pc. Its been awhile since I setup a share on my antiX box, but I've used samba for that in the past.

You can also use dropbox to keep a folder synced on all your machines. There are windows, osx, and linux clients. This is how I move most files from my antiX box to the other machines if I need to. 2GB accounts are free. There used to be a version in the community repo, but I've installed the version direct from dropbox.com and it works fine.

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