A Windows that "looks and acts" like Windows... that would prob'ly be one with the awesome KDE desktop. My first and best recommendation is Mepis!!

It's rock-stable, thoroughly tested and proven, doesn't include any buggy experimental software by default that would trip up a newbie. You didn't say what kind of computer it's for or what it's resources are, but Mepis runs quickly, intuitively, and responsively on my 6-year-old Dell Dimension with it's measly little 512 of RAM. It's sweet, highly graphical, and "familiar" looking to a Windows user because of that wicked cool desktop.

I think you'd love it!

-Robin

The only thing I can infer so far is that you are probably interested in Active Directory, and some other MS server services.

If you want to make Linux a PDC for an AD environment, that is no small feat, but it can be done using Samba and bind and openldap and a kerberos server. It's easier to emulate an NT4 domain or a windows workgroup. If you are interested in being the PDC or BDC, then it's simple enough to join a linux machine to a domain. You can also achieve this using samba and winbind in conjunction with PAM and it's plugin for kerberose and an ldap client to join the domain. There's also a product out there called LikeWise that simplifies this task for you (custom winbind and configures PAM for you).

If you just want to start making files and folders and printers available, Samba is all you need.

As was stated earlier, everything else can be done, too. E.G. instead of MS SQL, you might consider MySQL or Postgress, instead of IIS, you might consider Apache or Lighttpd, instead of Exchange, you may consider Qmail / Qpop or Exim and Courier, etc.

The more information you give us about what exactly it is you are trying to do, the better we can help you.

It is possible, but it's not easy. I was actually just reading up on Samba 4, and it seems that they have made great strides to simplify the entire process, by including an LDAP server w/ the correct schemes / semantics, and embedding their own KERBEROS 5 server, too. Assuming that Samba 4 works as advertised, then to build a PDC you jsut need to add BIND or some other DNS server and sync that config w/ the LDAP schema.

I have not yet done any of this with Samba 4, but my curiosity is piqued, now. I may build myself a couple of Virtual machines to test it out for myself, and then write a howto.

I'll keep you posted. ;)