Seeing Network Drives / Get Samba Working
For the Desktop it looks like only the workgroup was added to get the network drive to work.
Step 1: SMBNetFS is a Linux/FreeBSD filesystem that allow you to use samba/microsoft network in the same manner as the network neighborhood in Microsoft Windows. (Refer: ubuntuforums) Run the following command:
sudo apt-get smbnetfs
Step 2: Change you work group:
sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf
Scroll down until you find the Global Settings section and look for WORKGROUP, change it to your workgroup, save and reboot for changes to take effect.
Step 3: User the following command to add a user to samba:
sudo smbpassd -a username
Get a list of all shares for that host name, it means samba is working but nautilus is not interpreting the output as it should. HOSTNAME = host name or ip address.
smbclient --list=HOSTNAME
Playback Codecs and other goodies
Step 1: Install fonts and various codecs by add/remove programs, searching for "Ubuntu Restricted Extras"
DVD Playback
How to install DVD playback for Ubuntu 8.10
Step 1: Get libdvdread3 package
sudo apt-get install libdvdread3
Step 2: Run setup
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
Microsoft Fonts
Refer: Installing libdvdcss2Installing Microsoft Truetype fonts on Ubuntu
Step 1: You can install the MS core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package. To do this, enable the "Universe" component of the repositories. This is done by default in Feisty. After you do that, use the following command from the command line:
sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts
This will give you the core fonts, but if there are other TrueType fonts that you want installed, it is as easy as copying the font files to the ~/.fonts/ directory.
Step 2: After installing new fonts, you will have to log out and log in again to be able to see and use the new fonts. If you want to avoid this, you can regenerate the fonts cache by issuing the following command:
sudo fc-cache -fv
Other Tweaks
- Turn off thumbnail previews in Nautilus, it creates a .Thumbnails folder in your home directory that can get quite large over time; otherwise, you probably want to institute some type of regular cleanup for it. It's currently in Edit, Preferences, Preview, Show Thumbnails (never)