File sharing on Ubuntu was very, very easy, but for some reason, I couldn’t access P’s XP system, and my SUSE laptop couldn’t access some of the partitions on my desktop; specifically one NTFS and one FAT32. I can now do all of the above; I just played Ola’s “Feelgood” (which lives on the FAT32 partition on my desktop’s second HDD that had stubbornly refused to allow more than file listing with no actual access) on P’s computer, and on my laptop, and I can access his shared directory, which I could not before even though his firewall wasn’t blocking me.

Now, this is where I detail the method I used to finally get it working, complete with a bunch of nerdy, cryptic commands….

I don’t know. I have no idea why it works now when it didn’t this morning even after I’d made the changes. All I did was edit my fstab to automount all partitions except for my XP partition, and I think I changed the permissions on the FAT32 partition to allow writing, which sounds less safe than it is because we’re all behind a secured router anyway and the laptop is on an encrypted wireless connection. If I allow write access, I can download a song on P’s machine or my laptop and put it on my desktop rather than having to stick it on a thumb drive or email it to myself or something. Actually, I think there are a few on the laptop that I never got around to putting in my music directory anyway. Someday, I’ll just put up a file server, but for now, my desktop is the de facto file server, and it’ll do. Anyway, who cares why it works, just as long as it does? 😀