Thunar File Manager and Mounted Network Windows XP Drives

I've got my 14-y-o daughter an Aspire One, which she is delighted with, and I want to let her connect to the home Windows XP machine for filesharing as necessary when she's using the machine at home.

I am able to successfully mount shared drives from my networked Windows XP machine, and have added menu items to do the connection to the 3 different drives. I can see, read and write to the shared drives both from the terminal and OpenOffice programmes. But when I click on the folder in Thunar File Manager I can't see the contents of the drive unless I start thunar from the command line...
sudo thunar &
i.e. running Thunar as root. How can I get round this? I am mounting the drives with ...
sudo mount -t cifs //PCname/SharedDocs /home/user/SharedDocs -o username=john,password= -o uid=user,gid=user
and the files all appear to be correctly owned by user/user.
Any suggestions on how to get the files to appear?

Update: I've discovered if I change the option in ~/.config/Thunar/thunarrc
DiskView=FALSE
to:
DiskView=TRUE
...when I navigate the disk file structure to my /home/user/SharedDocs directory I can see the files, but still not when I navigate via MyDisk to My Disk:///SharedDocs
OK. Well that works, but it's a bit clunky and I don't want my daughter to have to traverse the mysteries of the UNIX file system to find stuff and get confused by seeing files in the directory(folder) one way but not the other.

Must be some kind of permissions thing somewhere, I suspect, but where? What do I need to set? It's really irritating!

 

Hi jrmoody,

I'm a neewby on Linux and was having some troubles setting up Smb4k so as Thunar could see shared folders' contents. I found your post and, at the moment, I thought it that your solution was good enougth. So I went ahead with the next step in my Thunar customization process. That was changing predefined bookmarks.

Thru this post I was able to add a new bookmark to my NetShares folder adding a line like

Code:

file:///mnt/home/NetShares NetShares

to /home/user/.gtk-bookmarks file

But when I clicked the bookmark, couldn't see any network folder nor file. Looked like the 'My disk problem' was striking again. Then I changed my bookmark to

Code:

file:///home/user/NetShares NetShares

And that do the trick. Now I can see shared folders and files from Thunar also from my Bookmarks, but if you wish to use custom bookmarks, you'll have to create an autostarted script file to restore them every time you AA1 restarts. You can read the details here.

Unfortunately, I didn't find a fix for this in case you click 'My Disk'shortcut. Maybe someone else will be able to.

 

I found another way to aviod loosing Thunar custom bookmark.

Start a text edior as root and open file

/etc/rc.d/slim/nowait.sh

Find the line

Code:

rm -f /home/user/.gtk-bookmarks

and comment it as

Code:

#rm -f /home/user/.gtk-bookmarks

And save the changes made.

This command deletes Thunar bookmarks every time your AA1 restarts, so commenting it will let your bookmarks intact.