I'm trying (and failing) to get to grips with Samba.

My eventual aim is to have my windows laptop printing from the Inkjet printer (connected via parallel to the linux box) and the networked laser printer.

As is generally the case <sweeping generalisation>most of the docs are arse! i.e. presume lots of prior knowledge</sweeping generalisation>.

Lots of the docs, talk about "Shares". What EXACTLY do "they" mean by that? Is it shared folders/directories? Facilities i.e. the actual hardware, printers and the like? Or something different ?

regards

John

p.s. Sorry if that sounds a little grumpy, but I've been trying to get my head round this for days now, but haven't really got anywhere - plus trying to understand what others have asked and said from a search seems pretty hopeless at the moment!

To quote the manpage for smb.conf:

SECTION DESCRIPTIONS
Each section in the configuration file (except for the [global] section) describes a shared resource (known as a ``share''). The sec-
tion name is the name of the shared resource and the parameters within the section define the shares attributes.

There are three special sections, [global], [homes] and [printers], which are described under special sections. The following notes
apply to ordinary section descriptions.

A share consists of a directory to which access is being given plus a description of the access rights which are granted to the user
of the service. Some housekeeping options are also specifiable.

Sections are either file share services (used by the client as an extension of their native file systems) or printable services (used
by the client to access print services on the host running the server).