I was reminded yesterday of one of the last failing that is still present in Ubuntu for everyday desktop usage: Samba shares.

I do not have any shares setup on my home network so this has never been a big deal to me. My mother finally took enough interest in my operating system to allow me to dual boot 3 of her computers. Everything was up and running like a charm and then she asked "What about connecting to the file server?"

I click on "network" under nautilus and start clicking around - no where in here is the file server that every Windows system on the network can see (5 or so other systems with xp/vista/7 on them - so I know the share works). A small bit of time and some command life foo later I had hunted down and manually mounted the share and added and fstab entry for the drive so my mother would never have to go through that on her own.

That being said - did I do things the hardway here? Can someone please tell me there is an easy method that successfully detects and connects to samba shares without having to resort to CLI? Personally I do not mind doing this, but it is an issue when I am installing Linux for a beginner.

~Jeff

I have never had to do anything like that with a modern desktop Linux distro, they all have handled SMB/CIFS automatically. Not sure what happened with your setup.

Also a little confused how you mention "everyday desktop usage" and "beginner", but then talk about a situation with 8 desktops and a fileserver. Doesn't exactly sound like Joe Everybody's home setup.

File shares also failed between to Linux Mint computers at my friends house when he wanted to share an external hard drive between the two of them over a network... More "basic"? I have tried to get samba to work on several networks and it NEVER works.

~Jeff