[Linux] Mounting windows folders

Due to my new configuration which is using Windows as my default OS and Debian shell through Virtualbox, my need to have a folder shared between these two environment become a must in order to ease file sharing and exchange.

At first, i depended on “shared folders” feature of VirtualBox which after a while failed as i always get a “Protocol Error” whenever i deal with files IO on that shared folder.

That’s why i looked for another solution that is more stable than that one and reached to using “CIFS” as a way to mount windows shared folder on my Debian machine.

The steps are very easy to be made and gives you a stable robust solution away from VirtualBox problems. i can summarize these steps as follows

1. install on your Debian machine “smbfs” package which will add this new type of mounting called “CIFS”
2. suppose your machine IP is “192.168.1.6” and you shared a folder on it called “work” and this folder is secured to be used only with certain group which is administrators and one of these administrators is named “BioNuc” and have a certain password then your command will be                                                                                         mount -t cifs -o username=BioNuc ‘\\192.168.1.6\work’ <linux-path-to-mount-on-it>
3. After writing this line, you will be asked to insert your password in order to make mount process successful

That’s it, Enjoy sharing folders seamlessly

Giants Alliance

Two giants are there one called Windows and another called Linux. As i am fan of Windows Interfaces and Usability (by the way i use Windows XP) and also fan of the extreme shell power of Linux, I wished if i can exploit these two powers at the same time.

The solution i found was using Windows XP as my primary OS and adding Debian version on virtual machine. You may be asking why should this solution be said when it is well known and made by some many users but actually, i made some modifications to this solution.

What i did can be summarized in these following points:

• installing debian without any interface at all, just a shell no more
• using virtual machine shared folder technique to share a folder between my XP machine and my Linux machine
• installed ZOC program which is a powerful shell program that allows connecting using openssh and supports multi tabs which is very important feature not available in putty
• installed openssh-server on debian
• fixed an IP for my debian machine so as to save my openssh configuration one time only without changing it each time i connect to it

This way, i enjoy my XP machine and whenever i need the shell of linux. i connect using openssh on my debian virtualized machine and do what i want

I use this solution while developing ROR applications, i prepared the environment i use as follows

• installed ruby, rails, mysql on my debian machine
• opened remote connections to mysql database so as to use MySQL Query Browser from XP machine

Now, i open my IDE on XP machine that changes in folders place in the shared folder between two machines and i open my server from virtual machine and test apps on debian machine IP rather than my localhost

This experience is great and i enjoy it so much as i feel i have the power of each environment Windows & Linux at the same time

In order to optimize the performance of my Virtual Machine somehow, i raised the priority of these virtualized processes to ‘High’ or even ‘Realtime’. it is now better but not perfect

I think in order to raise the performance significantly, i need to buy another motherboard supporting Intel VT technology. Using such technology i can move virtualization from software layer (being a process that Windows XP Scheduler deal with) to hardware layer which should improve performance as stated

That’s it, i suggest you try this experience and Enjoy as i do