Originally Posted by Mac the Knife
Keef, I'd like to believe you're not a troll, but it's getting harder.
Sorry about that. No, I don't think I'm a troll. I've been accused of it a few times on Linux forums, mind. I suppose that's because I don't say what people want to hear.
I've set up Samba manually lots of times and never had to edit anything but smb.conf
Many others have told me the same. Sadly, there's obviously something "different" about my old PC. Samba wouldn't start without those changes to bootmisc.sh and local.rules. It does so now, without any problem, and I have the extra bits of code in my notebook for "next time".
Why do I get this feeling that you're going to say, "Well, I dunno, but Samba didn't work for me until I did it".
Because that's the truth, perhaps?
I don't know what distro you're using (except that it appears to be Debian based) but several months?
Yes, because I have other things to do than configure Linux. I spend a couple of hours; if it doesn't work, it gets put aside for a while. It took many attempts, with much googling, to get Debian on the Linux machine to see the HP Laserjet on the Windows XP machine. I've tried the same processes to get it to see the Canon Pixma colour inkjet, so far without success. It's not a high priority to have the colour printer available to Linux.
But your experiences seem to verge on the bizarre.
I wouldn't quite describe Linux as "bizarre", but it has been, shall we say, a learning experience. That said, it does
most of the things I'd expect it to, and it does them a lot faster than Windows did on the same machine.
I am very impressed with the way that machine will boot to Windows XP, or Debian (2 different versions - stable and unstable), Fedora, and Suse - all based on a menu at start-up. It also uses the same folders for Thunderbird e-mail in all the Linux versions (I had to do some tweaking to achieve that, but it didn't take long).
The point of my posting was to warn the original poster that while Linux is very capable, it's not a good idea to switch to it without a backup plan for "mission critical" applications - particularly if you don't have a local expert to help fix problems. I still stand by that advice.