Networking Utilities

When MSFT users say "networked shared folder," they're talking about the MSFT thing with the little flashlight, done with MSFT's trade secret Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. SMB has been reverse engineered pretty well, without any cooperation from MSFT. Your kernel has an SMB file system module (smbfs) and clients (smbclient) for seeing other people's shares. There's a free server program (at samba.org) for sharing your folders and printers. Ubuntu came with all of it, and no doubt it's got a snazzy GUI setup program. If you just want to share stuff between Ubuntu machines, use the Network File System (NFS) for folders and the Common Unix Print System (CUPS) for printers, and avoid the MSFT kludges.

MSFT's "Windows Remote Desktop" was necessary because MSFT's window system isn't network aware. MIT's X Window System was network-aware from the beginning, so no "Remote Desktop" was needed. You can run any "X" client application on one system with its display+keyboard+mouse on another. Traditionally, we used X Window System's built-in networking, but if you want to run it across the Internet you should use the X Forwarding feature in Secure Shell. Secure Shell adds compression and security.

(I suppose an example is in order. Let's say I'm in the back yard with my old laptop chinacat on my wireless LAN at 192.168.5.6. It doesn't have enough memory to run Openoffice.org very well. My new desktop machine chicklets is inside at 192.168.5.7 with lots of RAM. So I type "ssh -X 192.168.5.7 soffice" on chinacat. OOo comes up on my laptop, but it's actually running on chicklets. If I do this often, I might put it in chinacat's desktop menu. For that to work, I'll need a pair of SSH keys, one on each machine, which I generated with the ssh-keygen(1) command. And /etc/ssh/sshd_config on chicklets has a line "X11Forwarding yes")

If you want to run MSFT applications remotely, you might want Virtual Network Computing. Start with the Wikipedia article for a general overview, since the Ubuntuguide.org article assumes you already know what VNC is and does. A common shortcoming of free software documentation.

Your Linux firewall is a set of kernel modules called "netfilter." You can manipulate them with a command line utility called "iptables(." I understand MSFT's structure is about the same, since MSFT's TCP/IP stack was based on BSD's. When MSFT users say "firewall," they're talking about a graphical user interface package for configuring netfilter and translating its log output into popup dialog boxes. Since you don't want to put a bunch of iptables commands into a script yourself, choose one of the GUI programs for doing that on GNU+X+Linux. Rob Pectol's Ubuntu Firewall (http://rob.pectol.com/) might be what you want. Or you could just stick with Guarddog or Firestarter, which are in Ubuntu's repository.