Though not widely talked about, I desired to access files on the Home$ share of a Samba server from my Linux workstation. I had never come up with the syntax to do so.

Using mount.cifs to do the mount, it turned out to be simply //server/userid and no trailing $ or anything special.

Obviously I made sure that userid was the same user that was authenticating to the PDC in the first place. I did not try accessing bar's Home$ share using the ID foo, for example.

Today I needed to take a quick peek inside a Windows .cab file. Ubuntu at least recognized the extension as an archive file as it came up with the appropriate icon. However, it had no program associated with the extension, and Archive Manager would not open it.

I did a quick search and located cabextract which was available in the Ubuntu repository, and quickly got me inside the .cab file.

Thus noting it on my suggested list.

I have presented Samba at several technical conferences over the years. Following are links to the slides and also supplemental zip file containing files used within the presentation.

The overall posture of the environment being prototyped within the presentation is of a workgroup having a Linux based server and Windows based workstations. Little needs to change in order to support Linux clients in the mix, though such details do not appear in this presentation.

Presentation in PDF format

When my previous display started getting fuzzy, I plugged in another display and got a much clearer view until I rebooted. After the reboot, the display came up as 1280 x 1024 resolution instead of my usual 1600 x 1200. I went searching and found references to capturing the EDID from the display and correcting the EDID information. Using the Nvidia X Server Settings applet I captured the EDID, but the Phoenix editor was unable to open the file.

Copying my bug against ubuntu-docs here, Bug #440150:

I was researching how to connect a HP 6100C scanner to Ubuntu 9.04, and encountered these docs:

ScanningHowTo
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ScanningHowTo

Scanning
https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/printing/C/scanning.html

The Terminal Server Client (tsclient) that comes with Ubuntu has the capability to connect to remote systems using the VNC protocol. However, it is grayed out by default.

To get it enabled, simply add the "xtightvncviewer" package.

Ubuntu 9.10 ships missing my favorite theme, Clearlooks. This may simply be corrected by adding the package "gnome-themes" which is where that theme resides.

Ubuntu 9.10 ships with far less screen savers installed by default. Notably my favorite was missing, Skyrocket. This may simply be corrected by adding the package "rss-glx" which is where that screen saver resides.