Been on the Linux a short while, another refugee form Win 10, finally settled on Mate 16.04, it is a fabulous distro. Mostly, Linux is fairly straight forward, if you have some computer smarts but networking…
Is there anyway to make that process flow like the software boutique, noobs are really going to struggle, I am struggling, still not successfully networked Mate with several Win machines. I have read many tutorials, watched numerous YouTube videos, feeling daft but not getting it done!
I have all music & movies on a main Win machine, is there a way to network simply, as on Windoze? I have a backdoor way, by installing Kodi I can see all the drives mapped through it in mate network folder but its not a real fix. Can anybody point me in the direction of a solid tutorial, that actually works?
As a side note, Steam is not working through the boutique on 16.04 but “sudo apt-get install steam” works like a charm through terminal but only if you do it first, not touching boutique install at all.
Thanks all, for any advice, haters spare me any Win rants, trying to learn, can’t switch a whole house network in one day to Linux when it impacts multiple users with lesser skill sets, baby steps.
Samba anyone?:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba
https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/samba-fileserver.html
Yep, clear as mud…
When I go into network folder, click on Win network icon it finds nothing, and I know everything is shared on Win system, otherwise Kodi would not see, plus all shared on Win network throughout house no problem
Not trying to antagonize but if you have never done this the directions may as well be in Greek…
This might help you a tad more?:
How about this? http://www.howtogeek.com/176471/how-to-share-files-between-windows-and-linux/
I shall try it all when I get home, thanks Wolfman, I will not be beaten!! desperate to escape the evil clutches of W10
Isn’t this just for sharing files on Linux?
The image you see under “Select Browse Network in Ubuntu’s file manager to view your network shares.” is exactly what I see after adding Kodi (on Linux) & mapping it to my Windows machine to read the music folders. I was thinking I could just grab something there, as it allows me to play the music on Linux but alas that’s where win & Linux differ, no right click add to desktop, this way is ok for quick fix but permanent share would be better. I can just use Kodi but it’s constantly dropping the wireless signal, where as playing from network folder, via Audacious it streams perfectly…hope this all makes sense?
SAMBA…
I’ve seen professionals struggle with samba. However, I have two new sources of information for what they’re worth. By the way I have never done any of this myself as I don’t network my machines.
The book (to buy at amazon)
The Ubuntu Beginer’s Guide - 6th Edition
Jonathan Moeller
Chapter 9 - Basic File Sharing with Samba
I have 3 books by Moeller which I used when I started out on 12.04 vanilla. I found them to be very helpful for a convert, easy to read and as far as I have seen without errors. They were sold DRM-free when I bought mine.
I suspect that “networking” is one of those things with a learning curve like an overhang. Good luck. 
I don’t do any file sharing so I’m afraid I won’t be of much further help to you, I was hoping that what I had posted would help!. 
Start here if @alpinejohn’s links don’t help you further!:
https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/windows-networking.html
Thank You All,
I shall invest some time over the coming weekend to try to figure this out, being as you can share files between Linux machines with Samba, I’m sure it can be done, seems as though others have. I could, as I said, use Kodi but it’s Wi-Fi drop outs make it annoying, if I could fix that part it would be dandy. Would anyone know; when I dbl click a network share via Kodi it mounts an icon on desktop, is that stoppable?
@smartnoise Possibly my experience with a NAS might help. There are 3 different computers that connect to my NAS, 2 of the 3 are dual boot Linux and Windows 7, the 3rd is a MAC Book Pro. In each case I only had to browse the network to discover the NAS, log into it, set a book mark in the browser. Now the entire NAS is available to all 5 OSes. I don’t remember exactly which protocol is being used on Win 7 or MAC OSX, but I know SMB is being used on Linux.
Maybe because the NAS is ‘always on’ made the process seamless - now it just works. Yes there’s a slight delay when accessing using WIFI but a simple retry always gets connected.
Regards,
Pete
My NAS is not a standalone server but a WIN 7 machine with everything on a secondary drive, not sure if that makes a difference here?
My 3TB NAS has an always attached USB3 4TB drive that provides:
1) backup for the NAS
2) extra storage for any one of the 5 OSes
I am able to browse both the NAS and the 4TB drive when using Ububtu Mate 16 or Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS.
Possibly the ease this happens for me has prevented some extra learning.
smartnoise,
Would highly suggest you set up your NAS using freenas 9.1. Free for download at Distrowatch. It is a learning curve getting the volume, storage, data set and sharing ‘stuff’ setup but then it’s almost ‘idiot’ proof. I started as a complete ‘newbie’ with NAS and finally got the system up and running. NAS sets up storage based on the number of drives connected in the NAS and uses the zetabyte file system which is data friendly. My freenas is set up with two drives, mirroring, and contains music, pictures, downloads and other ‘stuff’. The network sees my Linux boxes(2) and a windows laptop(wife’s). My boxes are hard wired and hers is wireless. As I said, some learning curve but the ‘how to’ tutorials available on the freenas web site and youtube vids were a great help. Good luck and do not give up. It took me over three installs to get ‘things’ right.
marvinudy
In the Software Boutique the is a Servers category, in there you will find Caja Share. It will enable you to share folders from Ubuntu MATE by right clicking on folder in Caja in much the same way you can on Windows.
For connecting to Windows Servers, the required “stuff” is already in Ubuntu MATE. Just use Place -> Connect to Server and change the type to Windows Share.
Can you make permanent folders on Mate from Win network connections, much the same as in Win? Would that be a Samba deal…
Have a great day… unless you’ve made other plans !
I also prefer the NAS type approach to sharing files on my home network. I have used freeNAS in the past and it worked decently well, but also found bit of learning curve with drive setup, etc. This was also a few years back and I ran into issues if I tried using any file system type but their own default (though this may have improved with latest releases). This mattered to me as I wanted my data share stored on a 2nd dedicated hard drive with a file system I could easily access on another computer should the OS hard drive fail or PC give up the ghost completely.
I ended up running a headless Ubuntu server (14.04) and set it up to share my data drive with SAMBA. Took me a few iterations to sort things out, but in the end it really wasn’t all the complicated. And it has worked great for sharing files between all my Ubuntu-MATE, MacOS and Windows computers (multiple of each os).
This may be more than you are looking to get in to right away, but I thought it was a great project to learn a lot about Linux. I’m working on a tutorial at the moment (which is based on Ubuntu 14.04) which I can share here once completed if you’re interested. And I promise, no “Greek” required, lol. I’m not a Linux or even a networking guru, but I’m learning and will share my learning in as plain English as possible!
Best of luck working through your solution… And stick with it! It will be worth it!
Thanks for the pointers, still struggling with the whole networking deal, now there’s a Samba update issue to boot! Really feel that this topic is one that could be addressed at a higher level, many ex Win pats are so used to networking these days, this will be a deal breaker for a lot of folks, with the advent of the Homegroup that made it so easy, this is more like how Win used to be, using IP address’ etc
Going to stay the course, maybe it’s easier to move all my Music & Movies to a Linux machine, assuming Linux speaks to itself easily? Take the Win machine out of the equation, although I am stuck with some household users on Win who want to share, big conundrum!
smartnoise,
I have a mix of linux and windows machines on my home network and have no issues accessing windows shares.
Make sure you have cifs-utils installed. That is what you need to access windows shares from linux and make permanent mounts for them. With it installed, go to Caja and “Browse Network”. Make sure you can see your windows box.
If you see your windows box, double click on it. You should now get a credentials prompt for username and password. Enter you info, and you should have access to the windows share. If you do not see your windows share or cannot access it, recheck your sharing setup on your windows box.
Now if everything is working to this point, you can now setup a permanent mount for that share via the fstab file located in the /etc/ directory. First you need to create a directory in your home folder or other place you want to put it to serve as the mount point.
Open fstab with root priveledges, and add the lines you need to make the mount. Here is an example of one of my mounts in my fstab file.
This should be all one line:
//192.168.1.3/storage /home/matt/Storage cifs x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=30,credentials=/home/matt/.smbcredentials 0 0
The first part is the remote location. The second part is the local mount point. Cifs is the mount type. Next is a group of x commands for systemd that allow for automount and wait up to 30 seconds for the mount to happen (usually waiting for network to come up; 30 sec is probably too much). Following that is the location of my credentials file that contains the username and password to access that share. With that all in, save fstab.
The credentials file is simply a file with two lines:
username=
password=
I have it located in my home folder and changed the permissions on the file to 600 once I knew everything was working (for security).
Then you can check and make sure your mount works by executing sudo mount -a. That will recycle the fstab file, and you should hopefully see your share at your local mount point. You can then reboot to make sure the automount works at boot time.
Everything I have written out here with the exception of the systemd commands(maybe) are readily available in how-to’s all over the internet. With systemd being fairly new, not all of them have updated the automount requirements.
Hopefully this help.
@dallasdawg: wow, the fstab route seems complicated even for me and I’m not a windows user.
Wouldn’t it suffice to create a bookmark for the mounted folder in Caja?
Edit: and have the OS store the credentials (keyring)?