Hi all, first I didn't know where to post this. Feel free to move to correct forum.

Alright, I have tried numerous distros over the past 3 months. OpenSuse, Kubuntu, LinuxMint, Fedora, Mandriva, and am now using Sabayon Linux. I have found a serious bug with samba in KDE. In the few times I have used gnome in a few of those distros, it was no issue and I didn't have to do any editing of fstab to get this to work. Nautilus just worked. KDE and dolphin is a failure when it comes to this.

I thought I had finally found a distro to stick with using Sabayon. Everything worked up until the other day. I have updated it to KDE 4.2 and was using SMB4K 0.97 just fine with my Dlink DNS323 NAS. As you know, .97 has the SMBFS option. This worked great for me. I was able to mount, and open an OpenOffice *.doc file, edit it, and save it.

.97 was freezing on me while transferring large files. So I updated SMB4K to 0.10.1, and now it will not let me save that same *.doc file. I get some error about input/output, blah blah. The option for SMBFS is gone and this is the reason why I am having so much trouble.

I edit fstab with a mount to the DNS323 but it will not mount, no matter what I do. It says only root can do that. I don't know how to make user mount and certainly don't know how to make root do it either.

Why is it that in Nautilus>Network>Samba>(share), I can double click on that *.doc file and it will open and save. Dolphin lacks this in KDE, and I have to use a broken SMB4K just to be able to mount it but it will not allow me to save.

Can anyone help me please? Gnome is not an option for me.

Thank you

on Linux based systems, there is only one Administrator "root". Normal users are not normally permitted to mount file systems, because it affects the entire system. You can run commands as root through "sudo" assuming you know the root password.

The reason why Nautilus "Just works" is because it uses FUSE ( only available on Linux I believe, and users can be permitted to mount these ) to mount the share by bridging GIO. This is Platform specific, and very dangerous ( especially if your network link goes down, any app interacting with that section of the file system will lock up and will not be able to be killed )

The probable reason behind not being able to save is the share is "ro" ( read only ) it needs to be "rw" ( read write ) in order to save

@ bcooksley:

Thanks for your reply but that doesnt help. How is Nautilus any different than using SMB4K? There has been a few times where it has locked up on me and not been able to mount or unmount.

Like I said, I have tried to enter a mount point in fstab and then "sudo mount ...." No luck.

With SMB4k 0.10.1, is there any option I am missing to make this work? 0.97 worked...

WildSioux wrote:@ bcooksley:

Thanks for your reply but that doesnt help. How is Nautilus any different than using SMB4K? There has been a few times where it has locked up on me and not been able to mount or unmount.

Like I said, I have tried to enter a mount point in fstab and then "sudo mount ...." No luck.

With SMB4k 0.10.1, is there any option I am missing to make this work? 0.97 worked...

I have finally found a solution to my problem of mounting a samba share on a NAS. But this is without many hours wasted. I don't know how many hours I have wasted on this. But one should not have to dive in to editing conf files just to make something as simple as browsing over a network, opening a file, editing it, and saving it. Many newcomers to linux will be turned away due to this.

Anyways, I was finally able to mount via a fstab entry and sudo mount -a

I found this thread in ubuntu
Mount Samba shares...

I don't know what all of those samba codes mean. So, I tried one by one mounting and unmounting each time. I was getting errors opening a file. I would get read only. And then it would not save once I did narrow it down. I found which one allows it to save and it is mounted with cifs instead of smbfs.

Code: Select all

//IP/SHARE\040&\040NAME\040FILES /home/user/mnt/SHARE/SHARE\040&\040NAME\040FILES cifs rw,nounix,nobrl 0 0

I know for a fact that the nounix code allows a word document to be saved. At least for me with my DNS323 NAS.

I tried with the other stuff but this worked.

Finally, why has SMB4K been so dumbed down? I looked at the entry it made in my mtab file and none of the stuff I found that works in my above fstab entry was in there from SMB4K.

This has been a really frustrating process coming from XP. I know many others would not have tried and tried again. This is something the KDE developers need to work on in making Dolphin easier and able to mount like Nautilus does. I don't have to edit conf files in mac or windows.

It is unlikely that KDE will gain the ability to mount shares for non KDE applications transparently in the future. This is because KDE 4 is cross platform ( Nix, Mac, Win ) and each operating system handles things differently.

All KDE applications are capable of using KIO, openOffice is not a KDE application, and therefore does not integrate.

I believe CIFS is the newer version, and replaces the smbfs. smbfs has not been maintained for several years now, which is probably why support for it was ripped out of SMB4k.

The reason why the way Nautilus does it is very dangerous is because it is done silently, in the background, the user oblivous to the hazard.

bcooksley wrote:All KDE applications are capable of using KIO, openOffice is not a KDE application, and therefore does not integrate.

Right, they don't integrate out of the box. But once setup properly (samba mount point in fstab) they work as intended. And that is how an OS is supposed to work.

I believe CIFS is the newer version, and replaces the smbfs. smbfs has not been maintained for several years now, which is probably why support for it was ripped out of SMB4k.

Correct, smbfs is not supported anymore as I've found out. I may be missing something with setting up SMB4K. But it needs to have the options that I have entered in my fstab. "nounix" "nobrl" etc.... I believe there was a line in the settings to enter stuff but I don't know if that is what it was for.

Point being, SMB4K misses being a great tool for those who know nothing about fstab and samba. Although I don't have a need for it anymore. It is lacking in setting up SOHO networks and "integrating" the programs with the users files. Not the way an OS is supposed to work.

The reason why the way Nautilus does it is very dangerous is because it is done silently, in the background, the user oblivous to the hazard.

This may be true. At least the OS works as intended for the end user though.

I am not arguing with you. But I am just saying that the way samba works is not very simple to learn for newcomers to linux like myself. I blame part of that on the documentation for samba. But when there is a tool like smb4k that fails to work. Then what is the point?

The point is to try to make a users job easier. It is the distributions responsibility to ensure it works fully.
It is probable that the developer(s) of SMB4k may be trying to correct issues like this.

However they have to deal with varying versions of Samba ( with changing Syntax ), and different security infrastructure systems of Distributions. Not a very easy job. It is likely that you have a newer / older version of Samba than them.