Connecting to shared drive

I bought my partner an Aspire One for her birthday yesterday. So far so good - it's a really impressive machine, and annoyingly slightly nicer to use than my Macbook Pro. Anyway, I want to get it connected to our home music server (headless WinXP machine attached to a wireless router). I currently use this setup with both the Macbook and a Squeezebox music player and it works really well. But we can't get the Acer to see the shared drive, or even the PC that it's attached to. Is there something really obvious that I need to do? I'll admit to being a complete 'noob' when it comes to Linux software.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

There are quite a few threads on here about this - you could do a search on Samba, which is the linux widget which gives access to SMB (windows) shares. The method you use will probably be dependant on what you want to achieve, and how technical you want to get - are you happy using the terminal?

 

What we're trying to achieve is streaming music to the Acer. I'm guessing (hoping) that the music player on the Acer will let me open a directory on a network drive to use as a playlist. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't as we can always pop some files on a SD card, but it would be more convenient to access my entire music library (about 240gb and rising).

The terminal is a bit of a learning curve, but not too daunting (famous last words).

Thanks for your help.

 

I haven't used the default music player, but I'd suspect that actual networking support is something Acer left out. However, if you mount shares to the filesystem (I'll explain that in a sec) I'd guess it ought to work ok - it definitely works with VLC and Amarok for me. This article explains how to attach network shares to a folder in your file system via the terminal. However, for me all I can do is navigate to the files via the file manager, select them and play them - no having them listed as a collection in Amarok etc.

I'm using a fairly pleasant music player called Amarok (Installation instructions), which lets me browse network shares. However, I've also got the Dolphin file manager (available from add/remove programs) installed,which does that, so it's possible that you need both programs for Amarok to have that functionality. However, although I can find the songs over my network fine (via File Manager), they won't play if selected from within Amarok, and so can't be used in the collection process which gives you a nice listing of all your tracks etc . A bit of googling suggests that having a proper media server solves this problem. As you already have one of those, it might work for you!

This thread contains instructions on using pyNeighbourhood, which will give you a program to mount network shares into your file system using a graphical interface, which you may prefer. I can't vouch for it personally.

There are several other methods I've seen mentioned, so if these don't quite meet your needs, search around a bit more. (Or perhaps someone will weigh in with the perfect method that I haven't seen yet).

 

Thanks for such a thorough reply. That's given me a few ideas to get it all working. As I said, it's not a must-have with the Acer, but it would be nice to get it all integrated.

Cheers

 

I see that in VLC it has a streaming option. How that works is anyone's guess. Too bad itunes isn't made for linux. That would be the cats meow!