Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

SOLVED

“ES File Explorer can’t find Ubuntu Server” — And for that matter, nothing can find the Ubuntu server. Not Windows XP, not Windows Vista, not Windows 7, not Windows 8, not a MAC, not even another Linux Desktop.

Every time I reinstall Ununtu, I have trouble making Samba shares visible to Windows machines — and to ES File Explorer on  my android phone.

You would think that when you install the Ubuntu Desktop, and you right-click a folder in Nautilus and try to share it, it would share. Ah — life is never that easy.

To get the shares working, I did a million and one things, but I think this is what fixed it.

First, get all the updates you should have.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Second, install Samba.

sudo apt-get install samba

Third, (and this is what I always seem to forget) make yourself a samba user with a password.

sudo smbpasswd -a username

Restart Samba.

sudo service smbd restart

That’s it.

It works for me now.

After installing Ubuntu 14.04, my second drive would not mount until I clicked on it. This was a problem for Dropbox and Copy, two applications that needed to access that drive on startup.

Initially, I typed these lines:

sudo mkdir /media/wd1tb
sudo chown username:username /media/wd1tb

And I edited my fstab with this code.

UUID=xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx /media/wd1tb ext4 defaults 0 0

That didn’t work. I don’t know why, but it didn’t.

Finally, I received some advice to use the UUID of the drive instead of my own name for the mount folder. The advice also instructed me to insert my username in the path to the mount point.

So I typed this.

sudo mkdir /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx
sudo chown username:username /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx

Naturally, the username is my username and the xxx in the example are the real numbers of the drive.

Then I added the following to the end of my fstab file.

UUID=xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx /media/username/xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx ext4 defaults 0 0

I don’t know why, but that fixed it. I no longer need to click the drive to get it to mount.

It appears that the Broadcom BCM4311 wireless chipset is incorrectly identified in Ubuntu and its variations, including Linux Mint. This applies to the Dell Latitude D420/D820 and higher series along with my Inspiron 6400.

Even Linux Mint 16 Petra was failing to activate the WI-FI on the install.

To install the correct driver, do the following:

sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer b43-fwcutter

reboot

Doing so turned on the wifi light and allowed the machine to connect flawlessly.

Thanks to Tim Shields for finding this for me.