My main computer at home has Linux Mint 18.2 64-bit, with the Xfce interface. This computer has two internal hard drives. There is a folder I would like to share on each of these drives with the other computers on my home network – one of the other computers is running Linux Mint 18.3 64-bit, and other is running Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit.
I learned how to do this by reading the following article, posted on howtogeek.com:
https://www.howtogeek.com/176471/how-to-share-files-between-windows-and-linux/
1. Install Samba — Samba is the networking software.
Open a terminal window, and run the following command:
sudo apt-get install samba
2. Now set a username and password for accessing the folders that you will share by running the following command:
smbpasswd -a <username> –> put the actual username, not <username>
The system will prompt you for an SMB password – enter it.
3. If you have not yet created the folder(s) that you want to share, create them at this time.
4. Open the Samba config file using your favorite text editor from a terminal window with root access (I’ll use xed for the text editor):
sudo xed /etc/samba/smb.conf
5. Scroll through the Samba config file and see if there is a [Share] or [sharedfolder] section. You will need to have the following lines for each folder you want to share on your network, so add or edit as needed.
[sharedfolder]
comment = Videos and Pics drive
path = /home/jim/Videos/Videos_and_pics
available = yes
Valid users = jim
read only = no
public = yes
writeable = yes
browsable = yes
In the above example, the “Videos_and_pics” folder, and all subfolders, will be visible to other computers on my home network.
Once you have a [sharedfolder] section for each folder you want to share, save and close the Samba config file.
6. Enact the changes you just made by restarting the SMB service:
sudo service smbd restart
You have now made your drive(s) available to the other computers on your home network.
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
