‘Nearly Works’ is worse than non existant.

gah. I’m trying out Ubuntu 6.10 just for something to do, and I wanted to copy a bunch of stuff from my (Windows) laptop to the Ubuntu machine, so I looked in the Administration menu, and there was a ‘shared folders’ option, so I chose that, and was greeted with a wonderfully easy interface for installing and enabling Samba support.
I shared my home directory and enabled writing and switched to my laptop to try to copy the files.
I attempted to open \\stuart-desktop and entered my username and password at the resultant prompt. The result? Being reprompted for my username and password. So I try again in case I’ve typoed, but no luck, still the same result. The samba logs at their default log level give no useful information either
From researching the issue it looks like it’s a bug that’s been known about for a long time, it’s been reported upstream but there’s no resolution yet. It seems to me that if a feature Just Doesn’t Work then you shouldn’t include the feature – especially if you’re supposed to be a polished, user friendly distribution. It’s always rather depressing when the very first thing I try to do with something doesn’t work.

I could always just manually edit the samba config myself and run smbpassword or whatever else is needed to make it work, but that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have to.
The tool implies that all I need to do is add a shared folder and it will be available. I have no problem with it requiring authentication, in fact I expected it to. But I shouldn’t have to manually fuck around with adding separate samba passwords manually through the command line to do it. It should Just Work, otherwise what the hell was the point?

I’m in the process of installing the kubuntu stuff too (for unrelated reasons), so I’ll be curious to see if the equivalent KDE tool works any better.
(update, no, it doesn’t. Gah)