Today I tried to install Ubuntu Linux 7.04 onto VMware server which is free.

The installation process is easy and smooth. After that I met  a problem on how to share the data with my windows machine which is using Vista.

After doing some search, I found two ways:

• Using the share folder feature of Ubuntu. It allows to share a folder with SMB.  After adding a folder as share, it is still not visible to Vista. (Pop up a dialog for password).

         It is necessary to add the user to SMB password list.

     Sudo smbpasswd -a username

• Another way is to let Ubuntu to access an Vista share.  I tried several ways to make it work:

  tried

  Run secpol.msc

  Go to: Local Policies > Security Options

  Find “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level”

  Change Setting from “Send NTLMv2 response only”

  to”Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”

  Vista defaults to only send the more secure NTLMv2 protocol, which these NAS devices / Samba do not support.”

                          Finally tried a manual mount

                           sudo mount -t cifs -o username=user,password=pass  //VistaIP/share   /mnt/vista

                  It finally works.

By the way, Ubuntu has an easy way to update software on it.   The command below can automatically download and install new software onto the system.

               sudo apt-get install softwarename

Have fun with it.