After a few years with several computers at home, I needed a little network to share our files without using external drives. With Debian it can be easily achieved, in less than 10 minutes.

Packages needed:
samba, nautilus-share,  probably smbclient

After installing these packages in every computer, restart your session and try to share a folder. To do that, simply right click on a directory and choose “sharing options”. If Gnome prompts an error, please make sure that your user is in sambashare group, and that the /var/lib/samba/usershare directory is owned by sambashare: 
$ chown root:shambashare /var/lib/samba/usershares/

Once you get no errors, you’ll see your shared hosts and folders in Places > Network. Mount the desired folder, and let the others connect to it.

In addition, you’ll need to set up a user in the  server. Let’s say we want to call it “edu”. This command will set a password for him.

$ smbpasswd -a edu

and it should be working now

Long time ago it was a pain in the neck to use ntfs units with Debian. Now we have a third generation driver in a package called ntfs-3g, but there is something extra to have a unit (specially external ones) working with write permissions. I had an external hard disk LG formatted with NTFS, and I wanted to make it work with my Debian Squeeze.

apt-get install libfuse2 fuse-utils ntfs-3g ntfsprogs

though probably with only ntfs-3g would work.

After that, plug your unit in, discover its device name (for instance, $ dmesg | tail -20), and mount it with the following line:

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 /media/LG -o umask=0,nls=utf8

Ready

If you are a GNU/Linux user, you may have forgotten that there is a lot of people behaving in a strange way, like using NTFS or FAT32. At least, I sometimes do. Today I got a pendrive already formatted (FAT32) and, when I plugged it in, I pretended to delete its contents. Debian told me «I can’t: it’s read only». It wasn’t read only, though. It had been  auto-mounted with standard methods. Since I wanted to delete all contents, I reckoned I could format it. Okay, it’s not one of the best practices because it’s a SD card and has a writing limit, but I just use it once a month.

debian:/home/edu# gparted

I umount /dev/sdf in order to format it, and… fat32 is grayed out. I can just use ext2, ext3, swap and reiserfs.

What nobody told me is that I need the dosfstools package:

debian:/home/edu# apt-get install dosfstools

And after that, everything worked fine. I now own a fat32 formatted 1Gb device.