Always working towards interoperability, Microsoft has refused to release information on working with NTFS partitions – which is basically what NT, 2000 and XP drives are. And, as usual, the Open Source community has made significant headway despite this. Anyhow, it is possible to mount a NTFS drive under Linux, although Redhat users must patch the kernel first. Another point for Mandrake there, I suppose. Fortunately, it is really easy and the NTFS how-to is one of the best I’ve yet encounted. Total no-brainer.
Next step: get Samba going to access in-house network.
After that: get Alphasmart hotsync working under WINE