Yesterday evening I installed the Samba package, so that Abi can now browse my machine over the network again, just as if I had been running Windows. The only difference being that it took me 2 hours to get set up, whereas on Windows XP it’s just a matter of clicking “Create new network share” or something simple like that.
Right now I’m trying to get network browsing working in the other direction, so that I can browse Abi’s laptop and our server. This, again, is not as easy a task as one would like it to be. Aparently KDE has modules included in it which allow LAN browsing. For some reason, SuSE appears not to have included these in the 8.1 Personal distribution. Maybe they think home users won’t be using Windows as well as Linux? Given all the other miscellaneous odds and ends that are included in the distribution, it’s hard to think why they would have left out what seems to me a fairly core piece of functionality.
But never mind, because we have broadband. This is allowing me to suck down the latest version of KDE (3.0.4, just released yesterday) in a reasonable time. Let’s see what happens…
Update: It works! And only a short trip into Dependency Hell. kdenetwork3-lisa installed without a hitch, but kdenetwork3-lan required me to grab kio-fish and smbclient, both of which were on the SuSE CDs. And after a little bit of twiddling with the LAN browing setup in the control panel, I was able to see our server. Yay!