I wish you hadn't told me that
I've just spent rather too much time browsing the Mepis forum! What with Fedora and Suse and Ubuntu forums, it's all getting to be too much education.
What I'm finding is that most of the problems I have are the same with most versions of Linux. Sometimes, one distro breezes straight past what was a total nightmare with another. On the whole, the fix that worked with one will work with another (if I can remember what I did - which is where my little notebooks come in handy).
Anyway, the same settings in smb.conf seem to work with Debian, Fedora and Mepis. That made it very easy.