File Sharing – How to Share Filesystem Between Linux and Windows

If your Linux guest has the SMB or CIFS filesystems available, you can mount shared directories on the host system (assuming you've configured networking between the VM and the host). (I'm a little sketchy on VMWare Player-- it's been a long time-- but I think it can do bridged networking between the host and the guest.)

The hardest part is going to be getting the Windows host's firewall opened up to allow file sharing. After that, assuming you can do:

mount //host-computer-name/sharename /mnt/mount-point-on-linux -t smbfs -o "ip=host-ip-address,username=valid-user-on-host"

By specifying the IP address on the mount command line you don't have to worry about name resolution between the host and the guest.

You can use either cifs or smbfs as the filesystem type, depending on which your kernel has. Both can co-exist in the same kernel w/o conflict. The smbfs code is the older code, but has always worked fine in my experience. The cifs code is newer, but has also worked when I've used it. Some people say that cifs performs better, but I can't say I've seen that. They have slightly different options semantics, so be sure to take that into account.

Because I feel that samba is a great choice, I'm going to have to correct your statement. The default setting for Samba is to rely on the OS to determine if they care about case sensitivity (case sensitive = auto). For Linux and OSX, this defaults to yes (case sensitive), while windows defaults to no (case insensitive). This is known as name-mangling, but wouldn't be an issue in your case. See the man page for details.

Its also important to note that Windows XP and beyond have a better understanding of case sensitivity.