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As I posted about a couple of days ago, I am getting into using Samba for the very first time:
http://bkhome.org/news/201712/toto-link-wifiethernet-routerrepeater.html
it is good that I am approaching this from a beginners perspective,
as I am seeing where there is awkwardness and uncertainty in setup and
usage.
Consequently, I am creating QuickSamba, a frontend GUI that
takes care of everything. It consists of stages, like a checklist,
starting with do you have connection to a local network, is your
firewall configured properly, is Samba configured properly, then there
is the scanning for and accessing of remote shares.
QuickSamba presents each of these stages and 'ticks off" each one as
correct, or won't go any further if not. In this snapshot, everything is
ticked-off so that local shares are available, but there are no remote
shares:
I will probably put some more of those little help buttons in the
window. The one already there explains how the local share can be
accessed by other computers on the network.
I have got detection of remote shares working, using smbnetfs. This is a Samba filesystem using fuse. Not sure whether will stick with it, as just learning, but it seems ok.
Note, if a Linux computer only has to communicate with a Windows
computer, there is no need for that final "Remote Shares" stage, as the
Windows PC will see the shares (and printers) of the Linux PC. So in the
above snapshot, /mnt/wkg/home will be available in the Windows PC. That
works fine.
As for printing with CUPS, I haven't got a clue. You can see the
comment in the snapshot about unblocking the CUPS daemon, however I
don't know if that is required. Maybe other computers can access a
printer on local computer with that being unblocked.
Anyway, it is a work-in-progress.
Oh, another thing. In Easy, plan to have a new icon on the desktop,
named "share", that will launch QuickSamba. As I am embracing Samba,
might as well go all the way.