I've spent quite a bit of time over the past couple of weeks, since installing Mint on a new machine, trying to get it to access and edit files on Windows machines.

The Network option in the file manager (Caja) gives me general access but something like Kate - or even gedit - is unable to access the Windows machines via the usual "open file..." menus.

On Ubuntu Lucid I use smb4k to access Windows and have no problems apart from typing in the passwords every reboot (which is simply due to the way I set it up). I can see no difference between the Ubuntu and Mint setups for smb4k.

On Mint smb4k has been causing me a lot of trouble and, from browsing the problem, other people are finding problems with it on Mint and later versions of Ubuntu. Initially I could browse two of the three machines through smb4k but the third refused to play. Eventually I seem to have killed the initial two machine accesses as well. :(

I added lines to fstab such that I'm down to a simple error message "mount.cifs: permission denied" (without the fstab lines it complains about missing entries). I cannot seem to get beyond this, no matter how many web sites I view. A typical line in fstab is:

//MACHINENAME/Catherine /home/dave/smb4k/MACHINENAME/Catherine cifs auto,gid=users,file_mode=0664,dir_mode=0775,iocharset=iso8859-15,credentials=/etc/sambapasswords 0 0

I tried smbfs instead of cifs and it makes no difference. Also tried changing folder permissions but since smb4k creates its own folders I doubt that would make a difference.

I get the impression that CIFS should take over from smb and to this end I've checked various CIFS options. Reading online I get the impression that smb4k has been, er, "outevolved".

I have mounted two shares on a couple of machines (total six shares across the three machines) using terminal and mount.cifs, using instructions found an several web sites. I can now see those two shares mounted in smb4k but I need to modify the permissions - currently the folders are accessible to me (I created the top-level folders) but the sub-directories and files, although readable, are not writable (all listed as owned etc by "root").

One thing I did discover, something I never managed with smb4k under Ubuntu (though I'm not saying it's not possible!): I managed to delete a significant portion of the C: drive on one computer! Luckily Mint's trash manager moved it all into the computer's trash folder and a simple drag/drop on the machine itself seems to have undone the damage. I'll clean up the /info folder later.

This is basically a sort of "what I did" record but if anyone has a comment or solution I would appreciate it. Apart from this, I'm getting on fine with Mint (I initially installed Ubuntu 12.04 on the new machine, failed to get on with the menu and wiped it - I guess it's a personal thing!).