Samba

I performed a fresh install of Kubuntu's new distro - Lucid whatever - today. As per usual, there is no front-end to configure Samba and I had to do it the old-fashioned way. The following are steps that should walk you through a basic configuration on creating a share that can be accessed from Windows:

1. Install Samba using sudo aptitude install samba smbfs
2. Navigate to /etc/samba/

I made a mistake earlier today when looking for a GUI application to manage samba shares. I installed the wrong application - gadmin-samba (which is quite fugly and buggy) - instead of system-config-samba which is clean and has worked well for me in the past. gadmin-samba added all sorts of nonsense and in a bid to reset the samba configuration, I nuked the files in /etc/samba to give system-config-samba something of a fresh slate.

A few months back, I wrote about my trials and tribulations with Samba in KDE + Feisty, but, now that I had a fresh install of Gutsy to play with, I tested the sharing applet once again. Once again, however, it failed out of the box, although I must say that it was not as fucking bad as the last time.

I upgraded to Feisty over the weekend. Everything appeared to have gone through smoothly. However, I found that I could not access my Feisty shares from my other Linux / Windoze boxen. The connection just failed. I could however access other samba and windoze shares _from_ the Feisty box (which was living up to its name :S). So, I tried going into System Settings, Sharing to sort things out by fiddling with the options, making everything readable and writable by everybody, enabling guest account access and so on and so forth.

All to no avail.

Problem: I've set up Samba on my Linux box and can access my Windows shares fine. However, every time I want to access a file from my Windows share, Linux, difficult motherfucker that it is, downloads the file, stores it in a temp directory and then plays it.. So, if I want to play .. say a 1.4 GB movie, I have to download the entire damn thing across my network to see it.. Not Good Enough.

Edgy (and apparently Dapper as well) have this rather annoying issue where the "Sharing" screen in System settings (Kubuntu) is greyed out even after entering admin mode, or if you open the fileshare module using kcmshell as root. The fix for this is to just open up your package manager and install the base Samba package which hadn't been installed.

Setting up Samba will be a very annoying procedure otherwise.