Ok, with the new laptop I’m thinking there are times I’ll be parked in the living room, but want to access my files on the desktop. I poked around a bit and had to piece together a couple of tips to get things setup right.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron uses Nautilus-share to handle the file sharing. So open a location and right-click on a folder you want to share… towards the bottom you should see “Sharing Options”. If you don’t, try this in the terminal…

sudo apt-get install nautilus-share

If it is already installed, you’ll get a message saying so. If not, you should be good to go… after you do the the following; in terminal run this -

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Then in the Global Settings section add the following line somewhere:

usershare owner only = False

Save, close gedit, and restart everything and you should be good to go. No say you want to share your Pictures folder, open your Home folder, right-click on Pictures and click that Sharing Options menu item.

If you want to just allow read access, only use the top check box “Share this folder”, give it a new name if you want. If you want to allow write access, there’s “Allow other people to write in this folder” check box. They will need a login on the computer doing the sharing to get at this though. If you want to allow just anyone access, there’s the “Guest access” option. You probably don’t want to combine that with write access, but that’s just me.

Anyways, after this… my windows laptop had no problems seeing the folders I shared.

Ok, as I posted yesterday, I bought a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. The biggest problem with it, it runs Vista.

I’ll deal for now, but there are a number of things that have to be done to make this thing “ready to fly”. First thing I did was download Firefox. I haven’t done a lot with add-ons with FF3 yet, but I’ll have to look in the best way to sync my bookmarks tween work, home and laptop now. Second thing I did was burn the restore DVDs, so if I need to, I can go back to factory fresh. I am debating on taking this thing down the Linux road… we’ll see. I have some programs I need Windows to run, so until I can test them on the desktop with Wine, I won’t be going that route.

Next thing was ditch MacAffe for AVG. Just a no-brainer there. I had to bite my tongue in Best Buy - While waiting for someone to help me, I observed another sales guy talk to a customer about antivirus and spyware, giving him two packages. “They both have anti-virus and spyware, but the spy-ware on this one sucks, and the virus protection this one sucks, so between these two you’ll be covered.”

Next was Open Office. There’s a 60-day trial of Office on here… need to figure out how to get rid of it without messing anything up. I wish I could get Evolution for Vista… I’m using it on my desktop and rather like it, so will probably stick with Thunderbird for now.

I have AutoCad, a mapping program, and some construction related stuff for work I need to get on here, but beyond that I’m not sure that I’ll be putting that much more. I have portable versions of a few things like GIMP, Pidgin and a couple others on my thumb drive that I may use here and there. The whole idea is for me to keep this thing light-weight. The majority of the stuff being done on it will be web based or basic spreadsheet and document writing.

Oh yea, when I unpacked the thing, the battery said 75%, and about 1.5 hours remaining. So I figured.. hey.. 2 hour battery. Not bad. Not great. But now that i’s fully charged, it’s telling me there is just over 3 hours remaining… so that’s better. I may look into a second, or a larger battery… but will wait and see how much I need to work just off battery for a bit first.

I bought a new laptop last night, and yes, I am blaming my sister.

Ok, need to back up. Seven Eight years ago next month, my niece and nephew were born. Waaaaay too early. They were born at like 24 or 27 weeks. Cole weighed a whopping 1lb, 11oz when he was born. His sister came in at 1lb 1oz. Unfortunately, they’ve been dealing with issues every since.

Continue reading →