LarsBlog

I have a aging 933mhz/256mb Toshiba Portege laptop that I still lug around with me sometimes because of it's small 12" form factor. I recently decided to try out the most recent X-Ubuntu (7.10 - Gutsy Gibbon) on it, as it is reputed to be a nice no-hassles linux distro which will run ok on older machines.

I'm pretty happy with it on the whole, but one of the problems I've had is the X-Ubuntu file manager (Thunar) doesn't support SMB browsing. In looking for a work-around, I found this thread on the Ubuntu forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=304131

And the list of steps in this guide (though written for an earlier version of X-Ubuntu) worked perfectly. It shows how to configure fusesmb to provide access to your SMB shares at a file-system level:

1) In XFCE's Applications -> System -> Shared Folders. (This
should trigger a Samba install if you don't already have a share, and
it should allow you to define the proper workgroup)

2) Install fusesmb in Synaptic (from Universe repository)

3) Edit /etc/modules and add the word 'fuse' to the modules list to be loaded (without quotes), and save the file.

4) Reboot, so the fuse module loads, and the proper workgroup is read for samba.

5) In XFCE Applications -> System -> Users and Groups...
Properties of your username... User Priveleges Tab... check "Allow use
of fuse file systems..."

6) Create a directory that you are going to mount your network browse
to... I used /media/network. Change permissions to read / write for
group and others (777).

*** 6.5) In a terminal, type: sudo chown <username>:fuse /media/network
(Where <username> is your user account logon name)

*** 6.6) Double check that the permission to use fuse took.
Applications -> System -> Users and Groups... Manage Groups...
find fuse and choose properties. Make sure your user name account is in
that group and check-marked.

*** 6.7) Reboot the system and triple check with step 6.6

7) In XFCE Applications -> Settings -> Autostarted
Applications... Add an application... name and describe as you wish...
for command line, put: fusesmb /media/network (Or whatever mountoint
you created).


Open Thunar, and navigate to the parent folder of your mountpoint...
then drag the 'mounpoint folder' to the places (shortcut) pane of
thunar.

9) Logout and log back in (So the user privilege and fusesmb autostart will take affect)

There were just a couple of tweaks I felt I should make:

1. At the end of the process, I ran synaptic package manager and removed 'samba', as this prevented an unused smb file-sharing process from running on my laptop (which was installed by the first step of the guide).
2. The guide doesn't explain what to do if you need to authenticate. Because you network browing is being handled by fuse at a file-system level, there's no way to get a nice username/password prompt, but you can configure per-server credentials in your ~/.smb/fusesmb.conf file:
   

   [/SERVERNAME]
   username=myusername
   password=mypassword
   

   You can even configure these at a per-share level - check out 'man fusesmb.conf' for more info.
   
3. Finally - while this was all fine for setting things up for my home network, sometimes I take my laptop elsewhere and I don't want to have to mess about with config files to browse/authenticate to different shares on different servers and in different workgroups. For this, I still fall back to the heavier nautilise file-manager from Gnome. However, by default, this replaces your X-Ubuntu desktop with a Gnome desktop (and I'm not sure how to get it back!). To avoid this, you have to run it as follows:
   

   nautilus --no-desktop

   I created a shotcut for this so I don't have to remember it. There's a tonne of nice icons to use for shortcuts in the folder /usr/share/icons/.