I am running a fedora 14 based system. How do I view and use windows file shares in gnome? I do not need to share Fedora files just use windows file shares. Windows 7 and is set to not use a password and the everyone group has full permissions which is what I would like to see in Fedora. How do I get GNOME and Fedora to view my windows 7 shared files?

Your W7 user has to have a password to log on to windows.

http://opensuse.swerdna.org/susesambacifs.html This should work in any linux.

First, I'm no expert. Just a beginner who had a lot of trouble doing just what you asked. I did it on Fedora 15 but you should be able to do it on Fedora 14. Here is what I did : I installed Samba. (www_dot_samba_dot_org). You should be able to install it using your distro install tools. Take the time to read a bit about samba on www_dot_samba_dot_org. You will need to edit samba conf file. All you need to do is to find the windows "network name" on your win7 machine. On mine it is MSHOME. You put it at the right place in the samba conf. file. Should be obvious. To start samba, open a terminal and type: smbd -D and nmbd -D (if I recall correctly).

I managed to see Win 7 shared files without using password. If I recall correctly there is a way to do that with Win 7 but I can't remeber how I did it.

There is a web based tool to help you configure samba, it is called SWAT. But I wouldn't spent to much time installing it. Once samba is started, you should see your linux machine from your PC.

You should be able to browse the file shared on your PC from your linux machine using the Fedora file manager (which is Nautilus I believe). If you want to mount the win 7 shared directory (let's call it win7_shared). You will need to create a mounting point(a directory), let's say /mnt/pc_here. So you do : mkdir /mnt/pc_here . Then you type the command : mount -t cifs //win7_machine_name/win7_shared /mnt/pc_here
Note that the system might not recognize the name of your win7 machine. I my case, I had to use its IP address.

So the command looked like : mount -t cifs //xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/win7_shared /mnt/pc_here
where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of your win 7 machine.

Once the mount command successful, you can do : ls /mnt/pc_here and actually see the shared directory on you win 7 machine.

Note that you might have to log as super user to do some of the command I discussed above. See for yourself. Also note that smbmount, smbmnt and smbfs are now obsolete. If you search the web and find anything about that, it probably won't work.

Hope it helps.

Install Samba and system-config-samba via the repositories:

Next, edit smb.conf:

First try just changing the workgroup name to match the workgroup name on the other computer and change hosts allow to include the default prefix for the ip addresses on your network (for example, all the computers in my network have ip addresses that start with 192.168.1.).

Next restart the smb service:

Now make sure you can browse to your workgroup on the network in Nautilus. If you can't try this default smb.conf file instead of the one that comes with Samba and make the same changes to it you did before:

http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/smb.conf

... and restart smb service just like before.

Make sure you can browse to the workgroup on your network now.

Once you've ensured you can browse to your workgroup, start Samba in the Application Menu or start it from terminal:

From here you can set up what folders you want to share and what users can access them

I hope this helps you find your way!