When Ubuntu 8.04, otherwise known as Hardy Heron, was first released I tried installing it on both my laptops. My older laptop (a Sony Vaio PCG-Z600HEK) had the previous release, Gutsy Gibbon, on it. That had worked with no problems at all, so I wasn’t anticipating any with the new version. Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of problems that made it pretty much unusable until I was finally able to track down fixes for them.
The most important problem for me was that I couldn’t get it to work with Windows shares as a client. It could sometimes see they existed, and very occasionally even manage to open a share, but that was all. It would then immediately stop working. It was obvious from the ubuntu forums that a lot of people were having the same problem and that the problem had been reported quite a few times before the release. I was also told that other people had installed 8.04 and were accessing Windows shares with no trouble. Incidentally, I found the problem wasn’t with accessing Windows machines, because I also had trouble accessing my NAS, which is a Linux box that uses Samba to create Windows shares.
It seems the problem is mainly to do with retrieving the passwords that have been entered for the network resources, and is in one of the gnome components, so people using KDE or who have no security on their network will have no problem.
It didn’t help that a lot of people on the forums who had it working seemed to misunderstand what the problem was, and kept posting solutions to a different problem – getting ubuntu to see the netbios names used by the windows (and samba) machines on the network. The solution to this problem is here, although it works better if the hosts entry in nsswitch.conf reads
hosts: files wins dns
There are 2 solutions to the problem of accessing the windows shares. The first is to use a hacked version of the gnome virtual file system (gvfs) that fixes it, but installing it would break the automatic upgrade procedures. The other is the one I have used, but I must admit I am a little unsure about exactly what parts of it are strictly necessary.
Modify the [global] section of /etc/samba/smb.conf making sure there are entries like
netbios name = <this machine's name> workgroup = <workgroup or domain name> wins support = yes
I think the next step is probably the most important, although it seems to be mentioned rarely in the attempts to solve it in the forums. You need to set up a samba password by using
sudo smbpasswd -a <username>
None of this quite fixes everything, but it does at least allow me to connect to and use Windows and Samba shares. Sometimes I can’t browse the workgroup and opening it shows no machines, so I have to specify the server name. I also can’t browse the shares on one of my machines, although I can see all the others.