How to browse home network? (Enlightenent Light)

[joeham]

I spent some considerable time fooling with the "network sharing tab" and I was never able to reliably mount windows shares.  There where problems with config files and user privileges.  I have been using fuse and smbnetfs.  It is a currently maintained clone of fusesmb (which has bugs).  It seems to be in repositories for debian distros but not in pclinuxos or slackwares.  However it was easily compiled from source.  You can find it at Source Forge.

To use it on a simple sharing read only windows share, you do the following:

make a directory in your home for example mkdir ~/Network

then as your unprivileged user invoke smbnetfs ~/Network

it squawks about no config file but uses its default config which seems to work fine for simple no password read only windows shares.

Then you should be able to browse the ~/Network directory as if it were a real mounted one.

You should see your windows machines and WORKGROUP or MSHOME etc and your shared directories on the windows machines.

When you want to unmount the ~/Network

invoke fusermount -u ~/Network

You could put all this stuff into some scripts and run them at login and logout I suppose.

Anyway, I like it because it is very simple and its easy to understand vs. the magic of buttons and tabs and the samba.conf file.

Your Mileage May Vary

[kyndscotsman]

Just wrote this guide so hope it helps................http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,85116.0.html

[jschall]

@kyndscotsman:

Thank you for that guide. It is very complete, and I am sure it will help many users.

All went well until Step 8. Winbind was not on the list of services.

I followed all the rest of the steps, but in the end nothing had changed.

smbmount is missing from PCLOS Enlightenment Light. Could the missing winbind service be a related issue?

I will create a new thread, hoping to get the attention of one of the package developers.

Thanks again, kyndscotsman.

[smurfslover]

Install task-samba to make sure you have all packages.

[nerdful1]

Could you or someone add to this a network of mixed Windows and PCLinuxOS (kde?) computers?

Then we'd have the whole ball of wax: Print to any Windows and PCLinuxOS machine from any PCLinuxOS and Windows machine.

My problem is I dual boot with printers on various machines, and usually the machine with the desired printer is booted into the opposite OS.

Would be nice to share music, documents, mythtv video files between all machines.

Nice project for the new year you got started...

Thanks.

[kyndscotsman]

Install task-samba to make sure you have all packages.

try doing this like he said to make sure you have it all.......and winbind too..

If all else fails maybe you should try out LXDE version.........when you go to install it only format /partition on and not your /home that way you save your saved pictures and documents.. LXDE is great for older hardware.....this laptop I am using is a Compaq Pressario v5000 with only 512 mb of ram...with my system up and running it shows that I have 373 mb available after boot and right now it shows that I'm only using 181mb of memory.....so this version of PCLinux is great for this low amount of ram by todays standards. The install also configured my built in wireless with no problems.

[jschall]

SOLVED (sort of).

I have to access my WINDOWS-shared files as ROOT.

In PCManFM, I can find a file (picture, music, video, pdf) that I want to open, but I cannot. Until I open the same folder as root. PCManFM has a convenient button that does this without even having to enter a password.

As root, I can open/stream anything on my home network. WOOT!

There is something amiss with my privileges on this machine. For example, if I open LXTerm and enter ifconfig, it tells me "command not found"! If I become root with su, I can enter ifconfig no problem. How can I give "jeff" admin privileges?

Thanks for all your help.

[kyndscotsman]

I'm gonna have to update my guide a little bit.........let people know to make sure to install samba server, winbind, etc.........also after you have Samba set up go to PCManFm and go to each folder that you set up as a share in Samba.........on each folder right click and choose PROPERTIES and then choose PERMISSIONS and make sure that OWNER, GROUP and OTHER have read and write enabled. Another thing is to go into your windows machines under the network adapter settings and there is a way to let windows know that there is a computer on the network that is using WINBIND.......I have to look at one of my other computers first to write down exactly the steps needed to do this but it will help. How about give me a SMBTREE output now.

[kyndscotsman]

Ok I updated my Guide so check it over again as some of the steps changed just a tiny bit