I don't think you need Samba just to connect to some SMB shares.

I rarely use the GUI to connect. Try manually mounting it instead.

For example, say I'm logged in as andy.marriott on a domain called WINDOWSDOMAIN and I usually connect to a share in windows like //somecomputer/some_share from Run in the start menu. I would connect to it on a random linux box using the following.

Code:
sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=WINDOWSDOMAIN\andy.marriott,password=XXXXX //somecomputer/some_share /mnt/some_share


If you're not using domains then substitute the WINDOWSDOMAIN bit with whatever your workgroup is. If you know the name of the one of the local users on the machine providing the share then you could use that info instead, just replace the WINDOWSDOMAIN bit with the name of the machine instead.

I do quite a bit of connecting to Windows shares using domain authentication from linux and osx boxes and it does work pretty well.


Edited by andym (27/06/2008 20:13)
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Cheers,

Andy M