LinNeighborhood

In a Windows network, you use Network Neighborhood to browse an SMB (CIFS) network, while in Linux you use Samba. However, with Samba you can access SMB only through command line. LinNeighborhood gives a graphical-user interface to Samba. Though LinNeighborhood has been around for a while, version 0.6.5 was released only in June this year. 

With LinNeighborhood you can graphically browse an SMB network consisting of Samba, all Windows versions and LanManager for DOS. The documentation at www.bnro.de/~schmidjo/ claims that you can also browse OS/2 networks, but this has not yet been tested. 

If you don’t have Samba on your machine, the first thing you need to do is to install it. For that, insert the 



PCQLinux 8.0 CD-1 (given with the PCQuest March 2003 issue) into your CD drive, change your directory to /mnt/cdrom/PCQuest/RPMS and run the following command.

#rpm -ivh samba-*.rpm

Three packages–Samba, Samba-Common and Samba-Client–will be installed on your system. 

Installation



Now, you can install LinNeighborhood. For that, from this month’s PCQEssential CD, copy the file LinNeighborhood-0.6.5.tar.gz to your home directory and run the following command.

#cp LinNeighborhood-0.6.5.tar.gz ~/

A list of mounted shares shows up at the bottom of the main window

This will copy the file, LinNeighborhood-0.6.5.tar.gz to your home directory.



Next, issue the following command to extract and unzip this file. 

#tar -zxvf LinNeighborhood-0.6.5.tar.gz

On extracting this file, a folder called LinNeighborhood-0.6.5 gets created. 



To install LinNeighborhood, run the following sequence of commands.

#cd LinNeighborhood-0.6.5



#./configure


#make && make install

Run LinNeighborhood



To run LinNeighborhood, click on the Start menu, open Run Program and type LinNeighborhood there. When you click on Run, you will see the main window of the software.

Within a few seconds of the software starting, it will search for and list all the workgroups and domains in your network. From here you can find and mount the shared network drives. To do so, browse to the appropriate workgroup and then double click on it. If authentication is allowed for all, you will see the shared drives. If not, then you will have to provide your username and password to view the shares. To authenticate yourself, right click on the computer you want to mount, then click on the Scan as User menu. A dialogue box will open, where you fill the domain name (if the machine gets authenticated by a domain controller), and the username and password of your user and click on OK. You can now see all the content to which you have access. Now, to mount any folder, click on it. This will show you another dialogue box, from where you can change the mount point and other parameters. The default mount point is ~/mnt/computername/sharename/. You can also modify the mount point for this dialogue box, if needed, by simply changing the path. Now, press the Mount button and your share will be mounted. You can also find a list of mounted shares at the bottom of the LinNeighborhood main window.

Anindya Roy