Pollywogs!

My work laptop has been acting up recently. Sometimes crashing explorer when working with network shares, sometimes just hanging explorer until I force it to reboot. I’ve installed so much junk on it over the past couple years, used it heavily for work and play nearly every day, taken it around the world…I guess it was inevitable that I would need to reinstall Windows?

However, when that time came today, I thought “wait wait wait, do I really even need Windows?” After a few moments and some time with pen & paper, I realized “no, no I don’t.” I have three programs which I need to run for work which I can’t either do with a native version of the same app or a comparable version of a freeware app. For those three programs, I’m going to work through VirtualBox, a really easy to use bit of software which lets you run a copy of Windows inside Ubuntu. The few times I need my Windows-only software, just fire up that old, expensive and restrictive OS, do what I need to do, and get back out again. The rest of the time that wonderfully easy flavor of Linux, Ubuntu, will do the trick.

Ubuntu installed quickly and easily on my aging Dell Inspiron 6000. One thing I wasn’t sure about was my wireless, it wasn’t immediately obvious how to ‘enable’ it, but a quick look at the Network settings got it up and running. Other than that, nearly everything was fast, easy and effortless. Drivers for everything ‘just worked’, from my video drivers to my modem drivers to my wireless drivers. Battery charging detected, touch pad…Perfect! Desktop effects were even enabled by default, the very basic Intel integrated video adapter has no problem making the animations smooth and beautiful.

Printer install took a minute or two. The only aspect which took some thinking was connecting the laptop to our local network. We have a small network operating around a computer running Windows Small Business Server 2003. I don’t particularly like it, it just makes shit more complicated than necessary. There was some kind of encryption operating which made connecting to network shares fail with an odd message, but a little work with Google turned up the settings on the W2K3 box which needed changed.

One other thing which needed tweaked was when I closed the lid all it did was blank the screen. I changed it to the normal behavior of putting the computer into standby and all was good.

I’m going to expand this post over the next couple days with information that I found helpful during my transition. I currently have bookmarks to the pages where I found help for my network share problem, for example.

Networking

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Trying to mount a share on a Windows 2003 Server gives you this message:

” cli_negprot: SMB signing is mandatory and we have disabled it.”

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=8479

“…Administrative Tools, open Domain Controller Security Settings.
Go to Local Policies then Security Options.

Scroll down to find the entry Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always). Set this to Disabled.

…Open up a command window and type:

gpupdate

This will buzz and whirr for a few moments before confirming that the policy has been reloaded…”

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Mounting a network share so that you can access it through applications such as KeePassX and Thunderbird (say, shared mail folders, shared profile installations, and so on):

sudo aptitude install linneighborhood

Then, right click on the Applications toolbar, hit Edit Menus, and create a shortcut for LinNeighborhood. I placed mine under System Tools. Note that the Create Launcher dialog may spawn behind your active window, so click on it from the toolbar and use this as the command:

gksudo LinNeighborhood

I put LinNeighborhood in for the name and allowed the default icon. Now that it is installed and we have access to our network shares, just a little work with LinNeighborhood. First thing I did was set the Preferences as so:

Under the Scan tab:

• enter my workgroup (actually the first 15 characters of our domain name)
• check off all of the ’scan as user’ buttons
• check ‘use group name on browse’
• check ‘use group name on mount’,
• ‘initial browse on startup’.

Under the Miscellaneous tab:

• Enter the default user with the credentials used to access the shares
• check ’save password’
• check ‘Use RootMountDir/machine/share as default mount point’ and change the location (in my case) to /home/garrett/mnt/
• check ‘Replace spaces with underscores’
• check ‘Memorize Mount Shares / Remount on next Startup’.
• Hit Save
• Hit Close

…and we’re (finally) ready to start actually adding shares…

I restarted LinNeighborhood, and drilled down from the Workgroup entry to the shares I wanted to access. Each time I was challaned for credentials, an ‘Insert User’ dialog box pops up with the default user information ready to go, so I just hit OK.

Arriving at my destination, I want to add the ‘Mail’ share. Right click on the share and hit ‘mount’. With the settings entered into the Preferences, most of this dialog box is already filled out:

Service, Mount Point, SMB User, SMB Password and the check boxes can all be left as default. The file and dir mode can be left as default. The only thing that I changed was that I made the shares accessible by my user account by selecting my UID and GID off the selection box (both near the bottom). Hit ‘Mount’, and the share should appear at the bottom of the LinNeighborhood window under ‘Resources’.

Now, any time you want to access this share, you simply navigate with your software to /homedirectory/user/mount/server/share (in my case /home/garrett/mnt/pcsserver/mail/). Easy, but not quite effortless…

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