Michael Harper’s Tech & Art Blog

Samba, http://us1.samba.org/samba/,  is widely spoken of throughout the Linux community. It is an efficient way of sharing your network resources like printers and shared drives with Windows computers. I even managed to share my 500 GB USB drive that was attached to my Ubuntu desktop. I installed the latest version of Samba from the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu 8.10. After installation, it installs to the System>Admin menu. Open Samba and take a gander at the window. It has been a few weeks since I installed it but I believe that Samba shares your default Ubuntu printer automatically. Which is great. Anyways, click “Add Share” and select the directory, folder or even USB device (found under the “Media” directory). On the Basic tab, make your share writable and visible and, on the Advanced tab, select your specific user or even allow anyone on your network to see your share.

I believe that is all you actually have to do on your Ubuntu machine. I actually spent a long between my original installation of Samba and the actual working stage I got to today. Next I want to point out that many tutorials actually recommend using the smb://(pc name or pc ip) method which never worked for me. I found that simply browsing the network from your Windows machine works flawlessly. From Vista, go to the “Entire Network” option on your start menu. On XP, I had to view “My Network Places” and click “View Workgroup Computers” on the side menu. I created a shortcut on my desktop from the shared directories and connected to my printer that was attached to my Ubuntu desktop. Now I’m wirelessly printing from two laptops and sharing everything.

I want to note that I did go through this tutorial, http://www.prash-babu.com/2008/05/how-to-setup-samba-in-linux.html, at some point before I successfully implemented Samba. I don’t think it actually affected my results but if for some reason you find that my method isn’t working, throw in the steps used in this tutorial and you should definitely be up and running.