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.