7. Configuring ClarkConnect - Connecting Shares

To connect to the Samba network drive from Windows, move to your windows computer, and then start file manager (right mouse button click on Start, click on Explore and click on Tools >Map Network Drive menu (Figure 13)

Figure 13: Windows Explorer

When you click on Map Network Drive a dialog will open that looks like Figure 14.

Figure 14: Map Network Drive

Your server address will be \\clark\test or \\192.168.2.36\test or \\clark\whatever for the share you created. And it will not matter what the user name is to log in. The acid test of setting up a Samba share is not whether you can map to the network drive, but whether you can write to the network drive. Figure 15 shows that I was successfully able to write to the share by copying a shortcut.

Figure 15: Successful Mapped Share Write

This is the end of the tutorial on setting up ClarkConnect. When you are learning a new distribution, the last step - becoming able to write to the share - can often take as long as all the other installation steps combined. As I said, ClarkConnect is the first Linux Samba distributon that I've been able to set up a share 100% from within the web user interface (i.e., without ssh and a terminal window). Hats off to ClarkConnect for making this possible. Linux wimps of the world unite!!!