Thunar Shares

Thunar Shares is an extension for the Thunar (Xfce file manager) that allows you to share your files using Samba. The plugin's backend is based on the nautilus-shares plugin. To install the plugin, you will need the following requirements: GTK+ version 2.12.x and Thunar.

To compile, you can run the following commands:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Alternatively, you can also build from SVN. Use the following commands to do so:

$ svn co thunar-shares
$ cd thunar-shares
$ sh autogen.sh
$ make
$ make install

To set up Samba, there are a few steps involved. First, you need to create a directory for your shares and assign the correct permissions. Here's a quick and easy way to get started (ensure you are running as root):

export USERSHARES_DIR="/var/lib/samba/usershare"
export USERSHARES_GROUP="samba"
mkdir -p ${USERSHARES_DIR}
groupadd ${USERSHARES_GROUP}
chown root:${USERSHARES_GROUP} ${USERSHARES_DIR}
chmod 01770 ${USERSHARES_DIR}

Next, you will need to specify the Samba configuration in your /etc/samba/smb.conf. You can use the following settings:

[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP ; you can change to your own workgroup
security = share
usershare path = /var/lib/samba/usershare
usershare max shares = 100
usershare allow guests = yes
usershare owner only = yes

Finally, add the samba group to your user. Replace "your_username" with your login name:

usermod -a -G ${USERSHARES_GROUP} your_username

In the latest release, there have been some changes to the libshares API to make packaging easier. There have also been fixes for internationalization and translations added.