Get Samba Rolling

At first glance, Samba sharing seems simple enough. And for the most part, that’s correct. However, even though Files (nemo) supports it natively, and even helps you set things up, it misses a step, but we’ll get to that at the end of my section.

Open Files (nemo). Head to your home folder and create a directory which we’ll use to share. Right click on the new directory. Click Sharing Options. If you haven’t done this before, you’ll see a message.

Samba needs to be installed, and your user account needs to join the ‘sambashare’ group. To the right of that message, there’s an Install button. Click it. Provide your password and hit Authenticate. It’ll ask you to confirm installing samba (click Install) and additional software (click Continue).

After everything is installed, the Folder Sharing window will ask you to reboot.

After reboot, Folder Sharing can be accessed the same as before, but you should now be able to turn on “Share this folder”. Click Create Share, and you’re done. Your user can now use this folder from other machines in the network. You’ll also see a new icon on top of the directory you shared.

From another Linux Mint machine I had on the network, I could open Files (nemo) and find the shared folder in the Network section. I double clicked on the hostname within, TESSA-ONE in my case, and the share was visible. However, I wasn’t able to log in with my username and password. This is because Samba shares use wholly separate user accounts and passwords than what are installed natively in Linux.

The step that’s missing for all this to come together is creation of a Samba user. You can name this account the same as your regular username to make things simple with `sudo smbpasswd -a leo`. The smbpasswd tool will immediately ask you to set a password. Do this, and if the password is different from your normal one, you’ll need to remember it when connecting to any shares on that machine.

If you have multiple samba shares, this whole process and upkeep can get really cumbersome.