Hello, first of all sorry about my bad english.

Ok, long time windows user (15 years), and decided to try learn linux.

Got and old pc with 2 HD's and setup Debian Squeeze (as per friend recomendation). I know it's not the newest.

I've been playin with it for the last two days, but i'm stuck.

I plan run an ftp on it.

so, as i was saying, it's an old pc. All onboard, with an 500 GB and a 4TB on it.

I did a fresh install of debian using debian-6.0.9-amd64-netinst.iso.

Ive not touched any option during the setup, mostly default option, gui installed, no extra options like SSH or file server installed.

My network works this way:

ISP modem > Airport Extreme router > switch > desktop (win7) > Debian

note: Airport gives ip's to the machines using their MAC ADRESS per rules set on it.

Debian get the ip fine and i have connection to internet.

As im newbie, i don't wanna setup most of the stuff now, i really wanna learn to do stuff.

So, i go to Places > Network and i can't see my windows share there. I have a windows Network there, but i click it and nothing there.

If i try alt + f2 to connect using samba (smb://mydesktopip) i got this:

Could not open location 'smb://mydesktopip/'

Failed to retrieve share list from server.

During Debian install, ive setup the workgroup to WORKGROUP, with is the same of my desktop machine.

I can see debian machine from Windows network.

I can ping desktop ip from debian, and it pings fine.

So i've started to "google" around. There's a lot of talk about samba, it's installed, but i don't think that what i'm looking for.

All i want is access the windows share from debian, so i can start move to the big HD.

I've tried this command:

/usr/bin/smbclient -L host

and got this error:

Connection to host failed (Error NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME)

And here i'm. I'm stuck, i can't see my widnows HD on debian, nor can't connect to it via SMB://

Is there a way i can fix it ?

I believe i'm doing something wrong here, can u guys plz help me ?

You've really given us very little concrete information. I am assuming the computers are not in a Windows domain structure.

Samba is a Linux program that enables Linux shares to be visible to Windows machines. To make it work, you must

• configure your smb.conf file, which governs Samba's behavior,
• mark the directory(ies) to be shared as "shared" in the directory permissions,
• configure the smbpasswd file , and
• start the Samba server process (smbd).

This may help: Samba by Example.