Hi guys

I recently installed Ubuntu with partion with Vista, and I am enjoying the Ubuntu experience will buy a book and learn this awesome OS, my question is this:

My wife has a laptop that runs Vista, and when i use my Vista she can see my files and I share this hard drive with her, but when i run Ubuntu she cant see this drive, i have extrernal hard drive as my backup with lot of different files on it and she can pull files from it but when i use Ubuntu she can see on her Vista Network, how can i make so when i use Ubuntu she can see my drive? On my Windows i set up sharing of files but how do the same with Ubuntu.

Any help would be great.

Thanks

You need to run the samba server to do that. Also open the ports that are needed as well. When you install and configure samba using Ubuntu's wizard, the latter part may be done for you as well.

What filesystem is used on the external drive you want to share? If it is ntfs, it may make more sense having it plugged into your wife's Vista computer. Linux can't fully repair or defrag an ntfs filesystem.

This book has sample Samba configurations you might want to look at. It will take you step by step in configuring samba and even using the correct permissions on a directory you want to share.
www.samba.org/samba/docs/Samba3-ByExample.pdf