Without trawling all the previous wisdom, is there an easy way to set up a network on a Linux PC. I have a 5 PC windows network, which works fine and I've added a 'newly loaded' linux machine which accesses the internet via the network fine but sees none of the other machines and they don't see it. I've installed 'smb4k' and kind of expected it to do all the work but.........?

Are you using a DNS server
What do you mean they cant see it are you pinging the devices and they are not resolving??

You need to install samba. Check if you have a samba-doc package. It contains 3 books, one of them is "Samba 3 by Example". The first few sample configurations are simple and every step is covered.

One thing you probably didn't do is add a samba user with the same username and password as a windows user. Also, the easiest way to get hostname resolution working is to add the hostnames and ip addresses to your /etc/hosts file.

In konqueror you can point the file browser at "smb://<hostname>".

There are different windows networking technologies, and setups so your question is a bit open ended.

I think what you are looking for here is Windows SMB networking, i.e. resolving UNC paths like //host/share/ etc.

smb4k is a share browser for KDE, which should let you browse your SMB (i.e. Windows) Network; you will find a manual at http://smb4k.berlios.de/handbook/usi...#first_startup

smb4k will not let your Windows machines see your Linux box in any way; it just lets you see the Windows network. If you want to share things from your Linux box so that your Windows machines can see it then you want to be using Samba. I'd recommend also installing swat, which will let you configure samba by going to http://localhost:9091/ on the local machine.

Hope that helps,

—Robert J Lee

No, I'm not using any form of server.

I downloaded SAMBA and confess I couldn't work out how to install it!

then you would need to add other hosts to your host file

pcname ipaddress and vice versa on the windows PC

Places, Network shows a 'Windows network'icon but there's nothing there. Getting smb4k to scan shows nothing at all.

what distro are you using

Pass on that one, I'm very new to this, lifelong Windows and DOS user although I do have the latest Ubantu disc which I think came with pretty much 'everyting'?

If you want to get some answers, you're going to have to provide a little more information so I can further assist you.

In your first post, you stated it's a "newly loaded" linux system. Who did the installation, you or a friend. Do you have the disc you used for that install. If so, what's the name of the linux distribution on that disc? Slackware, Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc.

SMB/CIFS (ie: Windows) networking on linux depends on a software called samba. We need to determine if you even have samba installed. To do that, login to the computer as root, open a terminal (ie: Konsole), and run the following commands (and post their output here):
Find out the IP of your linux computer, by running the command (as root):
Then post what is shown for "inet addr:"

Find out the IP of a windows computer. On a windows machine, find out it's ip by going to Start, click on Run, and type in cmd and hit OK. Then in the black windows, type in ipconfig and hit ENTER. What is shown for it's ip address?

Post all those results and I'll tell you what to do next.