If you want to share a folder on your Windows computer with someone who uses a Linux computer, you can use the Samba file sharing program. This article will show you how to do it. First, install the Samba program on your Windows computer. Then, create a new share called “Shared Folder” in the Samba directory. (You can find this directory by typing “smbd” into the Windows search box and pressing Enter.) Next, open the Samba configuration file in a text editor such as Notepad. (You can find this file by typing “smbd” into the Windows search box and pressing Enter.) In this file, you’ll need to specify the following information: The name of the share you created in step 1 The IP address or hostname of your Linux computer The username and password of your Linux user account The path to the folder you want to share on your Linux computer For example, if your Linux computer is at 192.168.1.100 and your share name is “Shared Folder,” then your configuration file might look like this: # Sample SMB/CIFS configuration file for Ubuntu/Debian hosts # See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Samba-HOWTO/ for more information # NOTE: You must have enabled sharing and set up guest access before using these lines! hostname 192.168.1.100 netbios name “Shared Folder” security = user passwd = secret guest ok = yes ..
Installing Prerequisites
If you are running on Ubuntu or another Debian distribution, you can install the required software by simply running the following command from a terminal prompt:
Testing the Connection
Now that you have the right tools installed, it’s time to test the connection to the Windows or Samba box with the shared folder. For this we can use the smbclient command like so:
In this example, geekmini is the servername and geek is the username. You’ll be prompted for the password. You’ll notice that you can successfully see a list of shares on the remote computer. In our case, we want to “map a drive” to the shared folder named “root”.
Create the Mount Point
Any time you want to map a drive in Linux, you should create the folder first. In this case, I want to access that shared folder from /media/Video, so I’ll first need to create the folder.
Note that I’m using sudo because I’m creating the folder in a system-wide location owned by root.
Actually Mounting the Shared Folder
You can run the following command to mount the shared folder to a local path:
Note that you’d want to use your own details in the command. At this point you should be able to access the shared folder from /media/Video
