Samba daemon on your system, you can move on to configuring it.

Samba shares

For Windows-based PCs to view your Linux machine, you have to configure Samba.

You can either use the graphical interface or manually edit the Samba configuration

file. (/etc/samba/smb.conf). Start up your favourite text editor, and open the

smb.conf file. There are various sections that you can change depending on your

needs, but the most basic is where you just specify the share name, the path

and the user rights. Go to the section marked as

[tmp] comment = Temporary file space path = /tmp read only = no public = yes

The [tmp] name denotes the name of the share that will be displayed when anyone

tries to access your machine through the Network Neighborhood. The comment tag

describes the information about the share [tmp]. The most important line is

the one about the path, where you specify the folder which has to be shared.

Ensure that the folder has the appropriate security settings to allow others

to read or write to it. The read only = no line means that people can also write

on the share. The same read only = tag can be made yes to make it only readable

by users. The public = yes tag makes the share available for all the public

around to see. Similarly, public = no will not allow everyone to access the

share; only the particular user will gain access. At the same time, in the security

section, change the security to share if you are not using Windows NT domain.

If working with text-based commands is too difficult, then there are graphical

interfaces that also allow you to configure Samba. The KDE desktop environment,

for instance, has a utility called Ksamba. GnoSamba is a Gnome program for configuring

your smb.conf and other Samba files accordingly. This helps in creating and

editing Samba shares very efficiently and also easily. There are many other

Samba utilities that ease your task and give you more control over the shares.

Maps of the world

After you have finished installing and configuring Samba on your Linux distribution,

you can go to any machine on your network and see your computer along with the

other Windows machines. Like with any other networked computer, you can map

the Linux share as a drive. You can access your Linux machine from other *nix

systems using smbclient, a Samba client that allows you to connect to a Samba

server.