Saturday, January 7, 2012

Installing Linux Mint 12 and Samba shares

So I decided to change to Mint from Ubuntu for my (fairly minimal) Linux needs because I haven't managed to get used to Unity. It may look cool, but it's a pain to use.

The good news is that installation was easy; none of the issues I had last time I installed Ubuntu. Other than of course the usual Gigabyte motherboard won't boot from USB issue I described (with the solution) in a previous post.

When I started to configure the system however, I did run into a nasty problem getting Mint to see Windows (Samba) shares on the network. I could set up Samba fine, and other machine could see the Mint machine and its shares, but the Mint machine just wouldn't see shares on either my Windows or OS X machines.

Anyway, after several hours of searching forums, here's the answer: you need to add the following line to the smb.conf file on the Mint machine, in the [global] section:
name resolve order = bcast host lmhosts wins
Unless this is in, Samba on Mint doesn't look for other Samba shares, and you never see anything.....

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