I'm new to linux, but I'm proficient with windows and Mac OSX.

I've just installed Mandrake 10.1 on my desktop. My wife has a WinXP Home Ed. laptop connected via wireless to internet. I also have a 2wire homeportal. I can't get either computer to see each other. I've installed every package I can find related to samba including swat. I've read Samba's website about configuring everything and how to run swat. When I try to run SWAT, I get nothing so I tried manually configuring smb.conf. It tested fine. Still, neither computer will see each other. /etc/services and xinetd seem to know about SWAT but it still doesn't run. Mandrake's config program won't see the other computer on the network.

1.) Any ideas why swat doesn't work? All the tutorial things I find just say run swat @ htttp://xxx.xx.xx.xx:901 and every thing works like magic.

2.) What I want to do is share the printer on my desktop with the laptop and I want to share a folder, too. This shouldn't be hard, right?

I haven't included output from any config files, since the ones I know about seem to say what the docs say they should, but there is likely some other file I don't know about.

Any help is appreciated!

I got swat to work, but still the computers don't see each other.

Just a thought. Windows Home XP doesn't play well with networking. Did it network before you put in Linux?

I got it to work eventually. The problem was with Windows, naturally. Shutting the computer down all the way and restarting worked, but I had to manually make it find my shared folders by going to add network place. For some reason restart didn't cut it.

There are a couple of Windows related problems at play usually.

The master browser. Usually samba SHOULD win the master browser elections, but with XP it sometimes doesn't. Therefore it can take a rather LONG time before shares become visible on your network.

Because of this I normally add all of the local hosts to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (copy hosts.sam to hosts in that directory and edit).

Then there are some potential authentication issues due to the way Windows hashes passwords and stuff.

One of the best debugging tools is to log into samba locally using SMBCLIENT so you can see what is going on.

e.g.

smbclient -L LOCALHOST -U VALIDUSERNAME

which will dump local shares

then try the same thing with your windows boxes.

smbclient -L WindowsBOX -U VALIDuserName

Oops, no machine is recognized? Immediate tipoff!

Add the Windows machine names to /etc/hosts in Linux and try again.

Once you get a response you'll be able to compare how the machines see each other or themselves using the above.