Summary

Because Darwin, a UNIX-like operating system, lies at the heart of the Mac OS X operating system, native Linux and UNIX network servers can be easily connected to these new Macs in a variety of ways. Mac OS X can take advantage of files shared from a Linux server over Samba (Windows file/printer sharing) and NFS (UNIX file/printer sharing).

Instead of just using native Linux server features, you can also configure Linux to act like an AppleTalk file and printer server using the netatalk package. With netatalk, you can set up multiple file servers and protect the volumes (directories) they share with various password and permissions techniques.