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The NetDisk™ by Ximeta is the first external hard drive that can be connected to either your Local Area Network (LAN) or directly to any PC via USB 2.0. Multiple PCs can simultaneously access any data on the NetDisk™ without sacrificing performance.

If you are connecting it to your network, drivers for some of the popular Linux distros are available on their website. However, it is built against older kernels. Hopefully they will come out supporting the latest kernels.

If you are connecting locally via USB, then it should be picked up as a SCSI hard-drive ( /dev/sda ) automatically.

The drive comes formatted NTFS, so you will need to format it ( FAT32 if you are also using windows ) prior to using it with your linux box. Below are just a set of brief guidelines to do so:

1. Partition

# fdisk /dev/sda
> d (delete partition)
> n (add new partition)
> t (change partition system id)
> c (WIN95 FAT32)
> w (save and exit)

2. Format

# /sbin/mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sda1

3. Mount

# mkdir /mnt/netdisk
# mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/netdisk

You can also set it up in "/etc/fstab" to allow all users to mount and write to it: How to allow write permissions to mounted partitions.

For more indepth reading on Partitioning check out the Linux Partition HOWTO.