Hands on: Hardy Heron hassle

I use both Windows and Linux and have been a long-time fan of Ubuntu, which for those unfamiliar with it is one of the most popular distros around. And justifiably so, as it delivers a lot of functionality in a format that’s easy to get to grips with, making it a good choice for those just starting out in the open-source world, as well as for more experienced users.

You can also get commercial training and support from Ubuntu’s official sponsor Canonical, as well as a wealth of community help and advice from the many users of the software, developers and Linux enthusiasts.

Unfortunately, the latest implementation, released at the end of April and referred to as Hardy Heron (Hardy for short), appears to have been launched with a significant bug - one that’s likely to affect a lot of users. This month, I’m going to explore how the problems manifest themselves or, at least, how I encountered them.

More specifically, I want to discuss the problems I encountered when trying to browse and connect to certain Windows and other SMB shares using the latest Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release.

Kiss me, Hardy
The initial install was more or less trouble-free. Both server and desktop implementations of Hardy are available. However, I downloaded the latter version from Ubuntu’s website and used the .iso image provided to create an install CD. This I then popped into a PC, enabling me to boot into the so-called ‘Live CD’ environment, from where it’s possible to evaluate the product without having to install anything. Happy that it seemed to work with the hardware I had, which is always a concern with older PCs, I was then able to load it onto the hard disk.

Apart from new desktop graphics, there are no major interface changes in the 8.04 software, so it didn’t take long to get familiar with what it had to offer and start doing some real work.

One the first jobs was to connect to the Nas (network-attached storage) server, where I keep all my documents. Again, this was pretty easy, as the latest version of Ubuntu features v2.22 of the Gnome desktop, which includes a new Gnome Virtual File System (GVFS) and that, among other things, contains back-end code to handle SMB file shares.

GVFS is also used by the Nautilus file browser, so there’s no need to install any extra software, such as Samba, to browse or connect to SMB shares. All I had to do to access the documents on my Nas box was go to the Places desktop menu and navigate down from the Network entry.

This menu option opened a Nautilus window containing an icon labelled ‘Windows network’, from which I could get to my Windows workgroup and see all the attached PCs and servers. I then clicked on the icon for the Nas appliance (called Linkstation), where I was presented with a list of shares from which I was then able to retrieve to the documents I wanted.

I encountered no problems connecting to the shares on the Nas box and was able to open documents using Openoffice.org by selecting them from the Nautilus file browser. So far, so good, but when I tried to browse to shares on a Windows XP PC, things didn’t go quite so smoothly.

It all seemed OK at the beginning, with Nautilus displaying an icon for the PC along with others, just as expected. However, double-clicking resulted in an empty window, not a list of available shares as expected. There was no prompt asking for a username and password to authenticate to the PC before browsing its share, which is what would normally happen.

Naturally, I then tried to browse to a few other Windows PCs (XP and Vista) and both Windows and Linux servers, some of which worked while others didn’t. I also downloaded and then installed the latest Ubuntu updates to see if the issue had been resolved since I obtained the software, but it hadn’t. I even installed Ubuntu onto another PC and in a virtual machine just to see if it was PC-specific. It wasn’t - I had the same problem on every PC I tried, both real or virtual.