Access windows share in Fedora 15

Needing an RPM based distro, I fired up Fedora on a VM. I was never a fan of Fedora and 15 felt right at home – half baked cutting edge features shoved into your face, leaving you struggling to find the equivalent of even the basic interaction. Still, I needed to connect to windows shares on a FreeNAS and google was of little to no help. Here’s what worked for me.

First install samba and samba-client

sudo yum install -y samba
sudo yum install -y samba-client

Then install the “places” gnome menu. It will appear as an icon on the right rather than a drop-down menu on the left.

sudo yum install -y gnome-shell-extensions-places-menu

Now you need to play around with your security policies. I run with SELinux disabled so I’m not sure what it would take to get a specific samba-friendly policy – you’ll have to google that. In addition, you’ll need to turn off your firewall or enable samba through it (I run without it). Now logout or reboot.

You can now use the familiar Places -> connect to dialogue to connect to the share.