Graphical Clients

In addition to the basic command line tools, there are also a number of graphical interfaces to the Samba client tools. They all provide similar functionality: the ability to browse a network, browse the computers in a domain, browse the shares on a computer, and browse the files within a share. All of the graphical clients mentioned here use the smbclient program underneath, parse the output, and present it in a easy-to-use manner.

TkSMB ( Figure 5-1 ) is written by Ivan Volosuk, and is available at http://www.rt.mipt.ru/frtk/ivan/TkSmb/ . As the name indicates, it is a Tk-based application.

Figure 5-1. TkSMB.

XSMBrowser ( Figure 5-2 ) is another Tk-based Samba network browser with a number of contributors. It is available at Chad Spencer's Web page at Iowa State University, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~chadspen/ .

Figure 5-2. xSMBrowser.

Finally, SMB2WWW ( Figure 5-3 ) is a Web-based interface for browsing a Windows network. It is distributed as a set of CGI scripts that access smbclient on the back end. It is available from http://samba.anu.edu.au/samba/smb2www/ .

Figure 5-3. SMB2WWW.

In addition, KDE 2.0 and higher has native support for Windows shares in Konqueror, their advanced file/Web browser. You can browse the network, shares, and mount SMB file systems, if the kernel supports it and the user account has appropriate privileges.