I didn’t go with P. today because it was cloudy, windy and nowhere near warm enough for any but the bravest bugs to be out. Instead, I decided to take a nap, with the plan to be well-rested before tackling the installation and manual configuration of the dreaded Samba on my brand new Hardy install. Usually, Samba and I don’t get along very well; I do what it appears I’m supposed to do to enable sharing, curse the air blue, demand that it work because I’m root and what I say goes, but it doesn’t work because for reasons known only to the software, it hates me and the feeling is mutual because I hate it even more. That has been my experience with Samba (especially, though not exclusively, on Ubuntu) for practically as long as I’ve known it existed. Fuck swat; a web interface doesn’t help me if: a. I have no idea how to get it open; or b. when I finally do figure out how, none of the changes I make seem take effect. Same goes for LinNeighborhood, pyneighborhood and whatever else I might have tried out of sheer desperation. Anyway, just the word “samba” has in the past generally given me a pre-headache, in preparation for the headache I usually had by the time it was actually (or at least mostly) working. Last time wasn’t too bad, but that was mostly because I didn’t have to look up “sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf” and knew what lines to uncomment, what changes to make, and knew I had to do “sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop”, then “sudo /etc/init.d/samba start” for changes to take effect (didn’t know that the first time–took me forever to figure out how to restart samba without rebooting). I memorised that stuff because I’d had to do it so many times.

I hadn’t looked at the changes in Hardy. As a card-carrying nerd, I always install the latest version, usually within a day or two of its release, so unless I’d seen, “DON’T INSTALL HARDY HERON, 8.04–IT WILL DESTROY YOUR HARD DRIVE AND EAT YOUR FIRST-BORN!!!!”, I’d install it anyway. Why read the changelog when I could be….doing the install. For that reason, I didn’t know that they’d implemented something called “easy file sharing”, but when (just for the hell of it), I right-clicked a folder and selcted “Sharing Options”, I was presented with a little window that had checkboxes where I could allow the folder to be shared, with or without write access, with or without a Guest account (for users not in the Samba accounts list). I checked the desired options, then clicked “Apply”, but since I hadn’t yet installed Samba, it said I could not share folders and offered to install the necessary software (that’d be Samba). Gun-shy from so many years of fucking with this stubborn software, I clicked Cancel and installed Samba with Synaptic, so I don’t know whether the auto-install would have worked (probably–did just fine with audio and video codecs), but after that, I went back and tried to share the folder…and it worked. I did run into a bug where it doesn’t tell you that you have to log out to be made a member of the samba group, but even that wasn’t too bad, and they’re fixing it now so you’ll get a prompt. My laptop was already a member of my workgroup, and the desktop detected it, adding it to the Places menu. I did change my desktop to be a member of the same workgroup, but I did that only for the neatness factor of having them all in one; it worked even before I made the change. Except for a FAT32-formatted partition that for some reason does not want to share (I think it’s because it’s FAT32; the ext3 partition shares just fine), “easy file sharing” really is easy, and I may even be a bit disappointed because I’d set aside literally hours to get this working. Now, I have nothing to do! Maybe one of the Manti-Dudes is up for a professional modelling shoot or something. 🙂