Displaying problematic characters for Windows like the colon in Samba shares

I have a Samba share which contains music files which I want to play on my tablet (but could also be a Windows desktop). The colon is perfectly valid in Linux filenames and is used a lot in MP3 filenames. On the client side it falls back to DOS mapping because the colon is not legal in Windows filenames. So it's impossible to see what the song is. Here is how you can make the displayed names more readable.

Add these lines to smb.conf, either in the global or a share section:

vfs objects = catia 

catia:mappings = 0x22:0xa8,0x2a:0xa4,0x2f:0xf8,0x3a:0xf7,0x3c:0xab,0x3e:
0xbb,0x3f:0xbf,0x5c:0xff,0x7c:0xa6

And for good measure:

mangled names = no

Those changes map problematic characters to extended characters. For example colon : is now displayed as the division sign ÷ It's not ideal but at least you can read the filenames now.

Credit to:  https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/299130/samba-how-to-display-files-with-colon-in-their-names/381639#381639

Don't install VirtualBox on Windows from a network share

Why not, you ask? Well during the installation process, network device drivers are installed (the cause for the several popup warnings about unverified software). These break the network connection temporarily and of course if your installer package is on a network share, your installation stops dead. Duh, stupid me. So install it from a local disk. A USB stick is also ok.


There is actually a longer story in my case. I was upgrading versions. After I realised my mistake I installed from a local drive. But unknown to me damage had already been done. It worked fine for a while. Then one day I decided to do some disk cleaning. Hmm, how come I have both 4.1.14 and 4.1.16 installed? Never mind, I'll blow away 4.1.14. Everything appeared to be still ok afterwards.


Next I needed to enable bridged networking for the Learning Puppet VM. No matter what I did, I could not obtain an interface to bridge. A search turned up this troubleshooting advice in the VirtualBox manual. To paraphrase, one reason for no bridged network adapter is MaxNumFilters is too low. Well, that wasn't it. It was another reason: "The INF cache is corrupt". After I removed %windir%/inf/INFCACHE.1, rebooted and reinstalled VirtualBox, bridged networking became available. It must have been using the driver from the previous release of VirtualBox because I had a partial install of the current version.


So that advice again: Install the VirtualBox package on Windows from a local disk.

How to access CIFS shares from a user account on Ubuntu Lucid

A friend of mine has a Samba server which I set up for him. His problem was that although he could see the shares from the file browser using Connect to Server, they were not accessible from Thunderbird for attaching to emails, etc. and he had to do a copy to a local directory first.


I did a search and found tips involving setting up fstab. This was not satisfactory because the machine was a notebook and the server would not be accessible while on the road. Tips involving autofs and automount were also not satisfactory because of the complicated setup.


I figured that since the file browser could see the share, it must be mounted somewhere. The output of mount showed that it was mounted on $HOME/.gvfs. The problem is that theThunderbird file selector does not display dotfiles. Other programs may have a similar restriction. My solution was this:


ln -s .gvfs GVFS


I then instructed him to look for his share under GVFS. Actually Thunderbird can navigate to dotfiles, you have to click on the Type a file name icon at the top left and type in .gvfs, but I figured that this was much easier for the user.


If you make a bookmark in the file browser and also tell it to remember the credentials for the connection, it should be one-click to mount. I think this should work for the other types of mounts that the file browser can do, e.g. FTP.