This is a new series that will describe the installation, configuration and management of Samba Linux in Ubuntu. This series is going to start with this post and will explain how to install and setup the basic configuration of Samba in Ubuntu.

Further posts will go into more details on managing users, shares, and Samba resources. We’ll also show you how to share files with other systems, including Windows.

For those who don’t know about Samba, here’s a brief summary of Samba.

Samba is a free open-source software that allows for the implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol. The SMB/CIFS protocol allows for computers on the same network to share/distribute and access resources.

This protocol is widely used in Windows to make files, printer services available to other Windows computers. With Samba, user can enable file and print sharing between Windows and Linux computers, including Ubuntu.

And that’s a brief summary of Samba. Do a quick search on Google about Samba and you’ll see lots of stuff on it.

Now, this brief tutorial is going to show you how to install Samba in Ubuntu as well as how to configure basic settings. To get started, sign into Ubuntu and run the commands below to install Samba and accompanying tools.

 

Installing Samba in Ubuntu

To get Samba installed in Ubuntu Desktop, run the commands below.

sudo apt-get install samba system-config-samba cifs-utils

 

For Ubuntu Server, run this

sudo apt-get install samba samba-common

 

Configuring Samba in Ubuntu

After installing Samba, the main configure file is placed at /etc/samba/smb.conf. Using the command terminal, you can configure a list of settings into the file that will allow you to share and access resources with other machines.

On the desktop, open Unity Dash and search for Samba app and open it. The app provides a simple and easy way to manage setting in the smb.conf file if the command terminal is difficult to manage.

 

samba-config-ubuntu

 

If you wish to configure advanced settings, you’ll have to use the command line to edit the smb.conf. That’s because System-Config-Samba tools doesn’t have advanced features to manage advanced Samba configurations.

In our next post, we’ll show you how to setup a workgroup, samba user and other fun stuff.

If you Samba app won’t open in Dash, run the commands below to install additional support tools for Samba.

sudo apt-get install python-glade2

 

Until then, enjoy!