Xubuntu Browsing Samba Shares with pyNeighborhood

From my research, which led to a previous post, it appears that it will still be a while before we have built-in browsing of Samba shares in thunar. I also pointed out that someone else had recommended pyNeighborhood and that I was trying this out. So, here is a bitmore about pyNeighborhood.

1. Installation

• Make sure you have all of the dependencies met. On Xubuntu Edgy, this should be enough to get you going:

sudo apt-get install build-essential samba smbfs

• Download the latest pyNeighborhood from pyNeighborhood.sourceforge.net The latest version at the time of writing is 0.3.
• Unpack the archive into somewhere that has easy access, like your home directory, for example.
• Then, open a commandline to that directory and run

./configure
make
sudo make install

• Then, double-click on the pyNeighborhood application that should now have been created in the directory. Doing this will open the main window, create some config files in your home directory under HOME/.pyNeighborhood/, and add an entry to the System menu.

2. Configuration
A few basics need to be taken care of. Open Edit --> Preferences.

• On the General tab, change the Mount Folder to a directory for which your user has write permissions. Typically, in your home directory.
• On the Network tab, you can (I did, but this wasn't needed) change the provided commands to include their full paths. Usually, /usr/bin.
• The same goes for the SMB tab.
• On the File Managers tab, I removed the provided entry and added one for thunar.
• One other change I had to make was to allow some of the commands to run with setuid. In other words, allow them to run as root, even when I am running them as a non-root user. The alternative to this is to run pyNeighborhood as superuser, but this can create other problems. To make these changes run:

sudo chmod +s /usr/bin/smbmnt
sudo chmod +s /usr/bin/smbumount

3. Using the application
Using the application is quite straight forward. On the right, is a pane to with a globe icon. Right-click and select scan to scan your network for available workgroups. Usually, there will be a Windows PC with the default MSHOME workgroup around. Scanning again on the workgroup will list the machines found. Highlight one, and right-click Add to add it to the pane on the left-hand side.

Double-clicking the machine on the left-hand side should list all of the shares available. If the configuration is done, you should be able to right-click on a share, and mount it as a SMB. This will add it to the list of Mounts in the second tab of the main window. If the mount is successful, a thunar window should open with the contents of the share available to drag-and-drop, or whatever you want to do. This is now available as a mounted drive on your local machine and files in this mount should be accessible as if they were found locally.

Below is a screen shot of pyNeighborhood in action.



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