Hi folks,

Fairly new to Linux, and loving it so far. The only thing holding me back is finding a way to sync my Zune without having to dual boot. VirtualBox seems like an elegant solution, and I've got it all up and running perfectly, except for this one problem, which is a BIG problem for me.

Breakdown: My music is all in the Ubuntu "Music" folder. Using VirtualBox shared folders, I have mapped that folder to a network drive within virtual XP. The Zune software reads the network just fine and I have my library all set up. Within Zune software I can browse and play all music files without problems.

However, the music will not sync this way, for reasons unknown to me. At first I was totally baffled, but I found that my problem is identical to the one expressed in this thread: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13094

Turns out the Zune can't sync through network drives like that, for whatever reason. The author of that thread suggests I instead use Samba to set up shared folders. I followed this tutorial: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202605

After much tinkering, I successfully used Samba to set up a new shared folder between Ubuntu and virtual XP. However, setting up a *new* shared folder is useless to me -- I want my Ubuntu "Music" folder to be the shared folder, but I cannot get it to work. I presume it is only a matter of correctly setting up the Samba config file, but all my attempts were unsuccessful.

Thoughts/ideas/suggestions?

Reading that link I understand that it's not a Windows network drive problem but a VBox shared folders problem. Good thing, otherwise the samba workaround wouldn't work!

Sounds like you've got samba working OK but haven't made it share your Ubuntu "Music" folder. Why not?

What's the path of your Ubuntu "Music" folder and what does your smb.conf look like?

Hi, thanks for the response.

My smb.conf file currently reads as follows.

As you can see, I was able to make a new folder "/home/Samba" and set up the network drive through that, and could successfully share files through that folder. I tried switching that path to "home/brett/Music" but even with all my tinkering, XP could not make the connection to set up a network drive to that destination. If that should work, it's possible that I just messed up something small, I plan to do more tinkering today when I get home from work.

On the other hand, I thought that perhaps I would have to configure the [homes] section of smb.conf, since my Music folder is a "home" folder. However, the [homes]section does not have spot to put in a "path".

Thoughts?

If [MyFiles} worked OK then simply changing "path = /home/samba/" to "path = /home/brett/Music/" as you did should (TM) have worked -- unless samba does not have permission to access it.

You don't need [homes] just because /home/brett/Music/ is under your home directory.

Any clues in the /var/log/* files?