I had a bad experience recently for what should have been a simple short adjustment. I had a friend who wanted to use minitower as print/file server in her apartment and it should work with anyone who she gives her router password to.

We started in XP for minitower and Vista on laptop. Changes to laptop allowed it to be seen in XP but XP was not visible on laptop. After HOURS it turns out problem was McAfee firewall. Played around with their settings (after I finally found them) and still could not get to work.

Switched to Slackware 12.1. I knew we needed cups and samba. I thought main difficulty would be printer drivers, but no, HP with hplip has these already as part of slack. Cups setup was rapid for local machine printing and test page worked. But too many settings to get sharing to work. Could not get to work and did not have enough time to read the detailed literature on cups and samba and their confs. Tried a few simple confs I found on web but didn't work as the vista laptop could not see.

Eventually found gui in kde for altering samba and cups and even this had too many poorly explained options and fields which you don't kwow what to use. After randomly changing options I eventually picked something that allowed vista laptop to see print server but could not use it.

Finally back to XP, turn off McAfee firewall and turn on MS firewall and it worked.

This all took 7+ hours, 4 of which were various delays as virus checker working, or antispybot working, or XP downloading upgrades, or trials and reboots.

Both the MS side and the linux side did not allow for a simple hook up. Both sides get failing marks. Around seven years ago this would have taken less than 10 minutes to get running in XP/2000/98.

I suggest samba people come up with simpler config for home users which allows sharing to common area (/tmp, /usr/local/share, whatever) and shares all printers. This could be something like the first line in smb.conf as simple or custom. I realize some of the linux folks and maybe I'm part of that now, are willing to spend some time tinkering with options but there needs to be a simpler/faster option for when its needed in addition to the increased flexibility that the more evolved setups allow. We need both.