About the command line, networking, and trackpads in Linux

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Klass Vaak wrote this in the “A Must Read Article on Microsoft’s Windows Strategy” thread.  PKCano has asked us to keep it on topic, so I reply to the message here.

@Mr.JimPhelps: with Linux there are also issue like the command line, which is a lot more important than in either Win or Mac. Furthermore, from what I understand there are also issues with tracpad, WiFi, network that Linux as an OS does not support.

I am looking at Linux as an alternative for Win, but those things worry me a lot.

Perhaps I can put your mind at ease!

I am not sure what you mean by the command line being an issue.

I have four laptops that have Linux on them at this time.  All four have wifi cards and touchpads (or trackpads), and all of them worked right out of the box.

Two of those laptops are old and use the single-touch Synaptics touchpads with discrete buttons (masquerading as PS/2 mice).  One is a newer laptop with a Synaptics clickpad (multi-touch, but not the “advanced” or “precision” type, using SMBus.  One is a newer laptop with Elan clickpad (multi-touch, advanced/precision) over i2c or PS/2 (the latter if it is switched to basic/non-precision in the UEFI settings).  All of them work, and did so both in the live session and in the installation that resulted.

The same is true of wifi cards on all four laptops.  The live session detected the available wifi access points and offered to connect to one of them.  I said no, since I don’t have my wifi key memorized (it is a random generated 63 character string of hex digits).

Once Linux was installed on each of the four laptops, I copy-pasted the wifi key from a text file on a USB drive into the prompt for the network key that the Linux OS gave me when I told it to connect to my AP.  It connected, and I had net access.

Simple as that, for my devices at least.

Three of my four laptops use Intel wifi cards (7260 or 7265), while the oldest uses an Atheros Mini PCI card (not to be confused with mini PCI Express).  I’ve also used an Atheros in the laptop that now has the 7260, and it worked fine too.

I don’t know about other manufacturers than those.  The three laptops that use Intel came with Intel cards (though not always the same one now in use).  The one with the Atheros came with a Broadcom, which I switched for the Atheros many years ago, mainly because I also had a router with an Atheros in it, and together the two were able to do Atheros’ proprietary Super-G channel bonding, which was a precursor to the 802.11N standard that also bonds two 20MHz wide channels together in channel bonding for twice the speed.

I have tweaked the configurations to make things better (to me) with the various laptops’ touchpad and wifi settings, but they all worked right up front, and continue to work fine.

I have also heard reports of some wifi cards lacking drivers or otherwise being troublesome in Linux, but I’ve never experienced them (excluding my dabbling in Linux nearly a decade ago).  I am not sure if these are current reports or if they’re lingering scuttlebutt from a time when wifi really was troublesome on Linux in general.  That’s how it was when I dabbled that time, having to mess around with installing wifi supplicant and NDIS wrapper, but even though I had never even seen a Linux PC before this, I was able to get it running nicely back then.

It was the Windows XP era, and I liked XP, so for me it was just an experiment to see what Linux was like, so I didn’t persist with it after I got all of that working.

Rather than worry that these issues may crop up, why not just give it a try and see how it works for you?  You can test Linux using the live USB (the install .iso written to USB stick) without having to install anything… just boot it and you will be in a Linux session.  See if the touchpad and wifi work!  Play around with it and see what you can do with it.  A live session doesn’t have persistent settings, so any changes you make won’t be permanent, but it lets you get a feel for the OS out of the box. I would concur with MrJimPhelps suggestion to try Mint (I like the Cinnamon desktop personally).

 

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I installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on 2 laptops and can corroborate what Ascaris said above. No problems with touchpads, and just as easy to connect to the internet as Windows XP, Vista, or 7. So far I haven’t had to use a command line for anything. In other words I’ve been able to find a graphical interface method to do anything I’ve needed/wanted to do. That said, I suspect there are things that one may only be able to do from a command line (I just haven’t needed to for what I use the computers for). I do get the impression that Linux folks are more fond of command line methods than, for example, Windows folks, so it’s easy to get the impression that one needs the command line for most things.

Like anything, there is a learning curve, but I don’t think you will have any problem getting a functional computer. But, you probably will want to start with Linux at least a few months before you have to dump Windows.

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@DrBonzo: thanks for your reassuring words My concerns are not from my personal experience of running Linux Mint in VirtualBox, but more from what I have read.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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If it helps, some additional confirmation from a new Linux Mint user who has never before even looked at Linux despite having started with MSDOS and progressed through every Windows version since its introduction.  Total disgust with MS only pushed me there quite recently.

For me, having first tested Mint “live” on a bootable USB stick, it just worked “out of the box” so to speak.  As for command line usage, I actually had to go looking for some excuse to try the “terminal” and learn some of its basic command syntax.  So I installed the LAMP server package along with PhpMyAdmin and found the commands no more complicated or difficult than the corresponding experience under Windows.  (Plenty of online help and friendly advice for “newbies” in Mint’s forums at https://forums.linuxmint.com/ if needed.)  Other than that, my only real need for using the command line was to tell the system that the hardware clock is set to ‘local’ time because I multi-boot it with several Windows versions.  Except for such minimal and mostly optional “tweaking”, almost everything else is done with a GUI that will require no great adjustment by long-time Windows users.  In any case, trying it “live” on a USB stick is well worth the small effort involved.

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@Arvy: thanks for your encouragement. I have been using Windows for 20+ years, and have recently started playing a bit with Linux Mint. I like the idea, the software seems fine, I also need to find Linux equivalents for the most important programs I use on Windows.

Perhaps you can answer this question: if a program exists in a Windows version and a Linux version, is it possible to continue using the files that were created with the Windows version under the Linux version? To me that is what cross-platform programs should be about, but maybe I misunderstand the cross-platform term?

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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Hi Klaas.  Generally speaking, applications that offer both Windows and Linux editions should be capable of handling user files (docs, data, images, etc.) created with either edition.  However, file format and other changes do occur over time with application version updates even within the same OS environment.  So it’s impossible to speak categorically and absolutely on the subject.  In some cases “importation” or other such measures may be required.

Just as an example in my own case, my biggest hold-back has been trying to find a suitable replacement for the Quicken financial management software that I use under Windows.  There are Linux alternatives, but importing a long history of financial data records is not a trivial consideration.

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Klaas Vaak

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@Arvy: thanks for that. Yes, I was expecting that interchangeability, though the caveat of format change always applies. An example: when M$ changed its Office Suite to the ribbon version, the formats had an “x” added, e.g. the Excel file format changed from .xls to .xlsx.

That is nothing to really worry about, usually there is a backwards compatibility.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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@ascaris, the last concern that Klaas Vaak listed, networking, is the only one on his list that I’ve had trouble with during my experimentation with Linux (Kubuntu). I’ve been having a heck of a time getting the Kubuntu machine to read what’s on the public folders in my Windows machines, and conversely getting the Windows machines to read what’s on the Kubuntu system.

Specifically, the most annoying problem has been that when I use Samba to try to read a public, shared folder on a Windows machine, it keeps asking me for a password. Since I don’t have a password on the PC in question, I am at a loss as to what Kubuntu is asking for. (Nor do I have a network password of any kind.) So when I leave the password field blank and try to connect to the PC, I get an error and it won’t let me get any further. Unless I reboot, the next time I try to connect it will go straight to the error.

So it’s insisting on a password that doesn’t exist. I don’t know what to do about this; I’ve resorted to sneakernetting with flash drives but that’s not a long-term solution.

My Windows machines get along just fine among themselves, reading each other’s shared folders. But I have yet to get the hang of Linux networking.

Any ideas?

 

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@Cybertooth – Does the How-To-Geek article at https://www.howtogeek.com/176471/how-to-share-files-between-windows-and-linux/ help you at all?  Windows 10 disabling of SMB 2 guest access (since W10.1709) may also be relevant. See discussion at https://serverfault.com/questions/895570/how-to-configure-samba-to-work-with-windows-10-1709

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Cybertooth

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@Arvy, thank you for the links.

The second link may be of limited applicability to my situation, as I’m trying to get the Linux machine to communicate with Vista and Windows 7 PCs; there aren’t any computers on the network running Windows 10.

The first link, from HowToGeek, I was able to follow much of the way, but I got stuck at Step Three of Option One, when he talks about entering “the password of the ‘geek’ account on Windows.” What password–huh? I don’t use passwords on my computers; can I just skip all this complication?

Another sticking point was in Step One of Option Two, where I’m asked to “configure a username and password that will be used to access the share.” My objective is precisely to access files across computers without the complication of usernames and passwords, so in my mind this whole step “does not compute” (so to speak).

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I believe what you need is to add this line to smb.conf at /etc/samba:

map to guest = bad user

If that directory does not exist, the only way I know of to add the functionality needed is to install the samba package (which is usually only needed to create shares, not to read from them).  Once it is installed, the path will exist.

I’ve had all sorts of trouble with this sort of thing in Windows too (as the server and the client).  It seems that everyone at MS has assumed that all shares are now password-protected (as you would expect them to be in an enterprise setting), and not tested much at all otherwise.

It reminds me of the whole thing with Ned Pyle at MS and his crusade to get people to end SMB1, which is no less secure than any other version of SMB if you’re not using passwords anyway (yes, this does have relevance to Linux– it’s coming!).  All of the security issues with SMB1 that we’re told render it unfit for use are about keeping it from downgrading encryption standards or preventing MitM attacks, but open shares are not encrypted anyway, and there is no protection from MitM on open networks.  I run my home network like this… I own every PC on the network, and I am the only user of each one.  I know I am not going to attack my own network.  I don’t feel the need for all the security.

At MS, it would seem that there’s no concern for people running open networks and who would like to keep being able to browse shares easily in the manner we’ve been doing for more than a decade. This is why user choice is a good thing– the crusader at the software company in question cannot possibly know our actual situation, so why should he be setting our configuration?

What’s worse is that Pyle is even setting our configuration if we use Ubuntu and not Windows.  It was on the Ubuntu bug tracker that Pyle asked Ubuntu devs to remove access to SMB1 in the 18.04 release (no reason was given), and they just dutifully complied.  The good news is that putting it back in requires editing the same smb.conf file and adding one line (max protocol = NT1).  Some references specify it as “max client protocol = NT1”, but the shorter version works for me, and as long as that’s the case, I am keeping it the way it is.

 

 

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
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Cybertooth

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@Ascaris, thanks too for the info.

I checked the smb.conf file, and the map to guest = bad user line was there.

I also added the max protocol = NT1 line to smb.conf.

Unfortunately, there’s been no improvement. I restarted the Samba service but that made no difference, either.

Did notice one change in behavior, which may be related to having upgraded to Kubuntu 18.04 from 16.04 over the weekend: now, when clicking in Dolphin on Samba Shares under Network, instead of the error message I had reported, now the error says:

Unable to find any workgroups in your local network. This might be caused by an enabled firewall.

This is actually worse than before, as previously it did find a workgroup except that it was asking for a non-existent password, whereas now it’s not even finding the workgroup.

 

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Edit: Maybe a silly question, but have you made sure the share is truly accessible from a Windows client without password?  I’ve had all sorts of these kinds of issues with Windows on both ends, so it definitely wasn’t Linux at fault at that point.  It is possible it is Windows causing issues now.

I’ve never intentionally password protected my Windows shares, but sometimes the Windows (as server) wants the user and password from a Windows user account on the server.  If you entered this a long time ago, the credentials may be cached on the client Windows machine, so that when it appears to be accessing the share with no password, it could be logging in silently.  Just brainstorming here.

Back on the Linux machine:

Do you have the workgroup specified in smb.conf?  Does ‘testparm’ in the terminal list errors? That will tell you if there are any syntax errors in the smb.conf.

Here are some of my settings from my working smb.conf on KDE Neon, which is a lot like Kubuntu (and both based on Ubuntu 18.04). Any number of them could be the problem, and I am not knowledgeable enough to say for sure which one it would be, assuming the problem is in here (it should be). There are a few in there that look like potential winners, like null password = yes, usershare allow guests = yes, usershare owner only = no, security = user.

[global]

workgroup = WORKGROUP
client max protocol = NT1
usershare owner only = false
name resolve order = bcast lmhosts wins
dns proxy = no
map to guest = bad user
null passwords = yes
pam password change = yes
security = user
server role = standalone server
unix password sync = yes
usershare allow guests = yes

I hope one of these works!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Cybertooth

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@ascaris, to answer your first question, yes the share (on a Vista PC) is fully accessible from other Windows clients on the network. All I need to do to view files on that folder, is to go to Network in Windows Explorer and double-click on it just like a local folder. That’s the experience I’d like to replicate on Kubuntu.

Adding to the frustration is my recollection (which I’m starting to question) that, at some point, I used to be able to do the same thing on the Linux machine, but no longer.

Thanks for sharing your smb.conf settings. Some of them were already in there, and I added each of the rest one by one, saving the file and then restarting the Samba service after each one just in case. But at the end of it, I’m not having any more success getting Kubuntu to even find the workgroup: still getting that new error message quoted above.

Does it matter where in smb.conf these settings are entered?

Wondering now about the “firewall” half of that error message.

 

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The entries I cited can be anywhere within [global].

I don’t know that the error means anything or if it is part of the new release. We already know it is not finding any workgroups.  The not showing anything is actually normal behavior in Ubuntu 18.04 as installed, since they obeyed Microsoft’s order to block SMB1, but you said you re-enabled that.  I had the same experience in Windows 8.1 when I tried disabling SMB1 per Microsoft.  This prevents browsing the shares, but they can still be accessed directly by URL as described below.

It can take some time for the computers to become aware of one another using NetBIOS… they announce their presence every ten minutes, I think.

The firewall thing is just boilerplate.  It says that any time it’s not working.  I am not aware of a firewall being installed by default in Kubuntu.  I know Mint has one, but it is off by default.

The warning from testparm could be the issue.  The NetBIOS name is the name of the PC unless you specified it in the conf file, as far as I know.  It should just truncate the name, but who knows?

netbios name = name in the global section of smb.conf should work.

Can you access the machines by typing their names or IPs into Dolphin?

smb://pcname (use the new netbios name if there is one)

Or their local IP addresses:

smb://192.168.1.5

change both as appropriate, of course.

That will let you know if the phantom password issue is resolved at least, hopefully.

I have a LAN with several (3 or 4, usually) Linux PCs and one Windows 7 PC (the backup server).  The Windows PC is set to have password protected shares off, but I seem to remember it asking for login credentials anyway.  I used that PC’s login credentials for the net login, and that worked.

It all works as you want it to, but it does take a while for the Windows PC to show up after it resumes from standby.  I am not that patient, so I just access the IP directly, which works instantly.  After I enter it manually, it begins showing up in the network listing.

SMB can be a pain.  I have had a few issues with it in Linux before, but nothing like the issues I had with all the networked PCs using Windows.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Cybertooth

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@ascaris, I’m struggling with this stuff. Networking is a glaring hole in my computing knowledge, so my comments and questions below are likely to be embarrassingly simplistic.

1. I don’t know what the Linux machine’s “NetBIOS name” is, nor how to find out. Nothing to that effect is specified in smb.conf.
2. You suggested accessing other machines by typing their names or IP into Dolphin. How do I do that? I don’t see anything in Dolphin that suggests I can enter an IP address into it to read another machine.

In Konsole (terminal), I did manage to ping the Vista machine, FWIW.

 

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Oops… sorry ’bout that!

Cybertooth wrote:

I don’t know what the Linux machine’s “NetBIOS name” is, nor how to find out.

Ordinarily, it is the same as the PC name, which you can usually see to the left of the $ in the bash prompt… but if the PC name is greater in length than 15 characters, then that won’t work, as the NetBIOS name has a maximum length of 15 characters (actually, it’s always 15, as far as I know, but the system handles padding it out if it’s shorter).

Samba should, hopefully, just truncate the name, so that the NetBIOS name will be just the first 15 characters of your PC name, but weird things happen all the time with PCs, so just to be certain (and to get the testparm to pass without any warning), it is possible to set the NetBIOS name to something else.  That’s what the netbios name = name (change the italicized name to whatever you want the name to be) will do.  I don’t remember how or if it handles spaces, so it’s best to just make it one word while we are troubleshooting.

As before, make sure the line is in the [global] section (after the [global] but before any other section names in square brackets).  If you run testparm again and it finds no more errors, see if it works now (remember that it can take some time for the PCs on the network to announce their presence).

You suggested accessing other machines by typing their names or IP into Dolphin. How do I do that? I don’t see anything in Dolphin that suggests I can enter an IP address into it to read another machine.

If you have Dolphin set to use the clickable path, just click a bit to the right of the path bar and it will change to a text entry box.  Enter ‘smb://pcname’ to try to access a PC with a NetBIOS name of ‘pcname’, which will also usually be that PC’s name in general, as described above.  Don’t worry about there not being any indication that you can do this… Dolphin will know what to do with it!  When you navigate through the network options, all you’re really doing is using premade shortcuts to enter the smb:// locations into Dolphin more easily.  Check out the URL bar when you do this, and you’ll see the smb:// URLs.

If you replace pcname as above with the name of the Vista machine you are trying to connect to, it will let you know whether the name is correctly being resolved to an IP address (if it works) or not (if it does not work).

If it works, that’s good!  You can add the location to the Places sidebar in Dolphin and go there directly next time if you wish.  The Vista PC may start showing up in the Network section after that too, because now the Linux PC knows it’s there.

If trying to access the PC by its name (the NetBIOS name, usually the same as the PC name) does not work, you can find out the local IP address of the Vista PC and enter that directly instead of the name (for example type into Dolphin ‘smb://192.168.200.1’, without the quotation marks of course).

There are a lot of ways you can find out the local IP address of the computer you want to connect to.  Your router probably has an info page that lists connected devices and the PC names associated with each IP, so you could look there.  Or, if you go to the Vista PC and enter ‘ipconfig’ into the command prompt window, one of the things it will let you know is the local IP address.  It is typically 192.168.x.x, but sometimes it can be 10.0.x.x.  This is the local IP address of the PC on your LAN.  It’s a local address because it is the address on your local area network.  The WAN IP (WAN is Wide Area Network, aka the internet) is something else, and does not play a role in the kind of sharing we are trying to get working.

Once you know the local IP address of the Vista machine, you can type it into Dolphin in the form ‘smb://192.168.200.1’, and it should, if everything, is working, immediately list the shares of that PC.  (This works in Windows too… but instead of ‘smb://’, type two backslashes ‘\\’, as in ‘\\192.168.200.1’.)

I hope I explained it a little better that time.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Cybertooth

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Thanks @ascaris, we’ve made progress: the error in testparm went away after I gave the Linux machine a shorter name, and after finding out the Vista PC’s IP address, I managed to get past the bit about not finding the workgroup. (Typing in the IP address got me that far, but typing the Vista PC’s name yielded the error, “Could not connect to host for smb://xxxxxxxx-xx/”.)

[For anybody else who might be reading this hoping to solve a similar problem, I got the address bar where I could type in the Vista PC’s name/IP address by clicking on the “Control” menu item at the top of the Dolphin window, then hovering over “Location Bar” and then selecting “Editable Location.” There may be simpler ways to call it up.]

However, we’re not home free yet. Although I got past that hurdle, now I reached an “authentication dialog” that’s asking for a username and password for the Vista PC. The thing is, I don’t have a username or password for that PC. We have basically reached the same situation where things stood before I upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04: it’s asking for a non-existent password.

Grrr!!! 

 

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On the Vista machine, go to Control Panel\Accounts. The account may not have a password, but it should have an ID=UserName.

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Cybertooth

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How silly of me, of course I have an account there, and therefore a username for it!! 

The process is still getting stuck, though, at the password stage. I suppose I could create a password and then the Linux machine might see the Vista PC, but that’ll be an extra hassle and I’m hoping there will be a way to “just see” the Vista PC the way that Windows computers can see each other’s shared folders.

Hopefully the following will not confuse matters irretrievably, but I noticed that when clicking on the Network option in the left panel of Dolphin, in addition to “Samba Shares” and “Network” in the right panel, there is an “Add Network Folder” icon. I clicked on that and it gave me several choices for the type of folder to create. Selecting “Microsoft Windows network drive” from that list takes me to a new dialog where I am asked to enter the following:

1. a name for the network drive,
2. a server address,
3. a folder path.

Not sure what information to enter for #2 and #3, but I’m wondering if this could be a workaround for getting Kubuntu to connect to the Vista public folders. I’d still like to pursue the original method, but maybe this one can serve as a fallback plan.

 

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In Windows control Panel\Networking maybe Advanced options?
You need a private network
Turn on discovery
You might start by sharing “Public”
And there is a check box for “password protected sharing” – if it won’t take a blank pwd, you may have to turn on pwd protected sharing and create one.

It’s been so long since I messed with networking manually…..

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Ascaris, Cybertooth

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@pkcano, all of those check OK (as desired). We may indeed have to resort to creating a password for the Vista PC, which however would be a pain in the neck because that would get in the way of access to it by the other Windows computers on the LAN.

Networking remains a bit of a mystery to me, and an aggravating one at that…

 

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I think I’ve got it, Cybertooth!

I was able to reproduce the behavior you describe in my PC.  By that, I mean when I tried to access my open share on the Windows PC, it demanded a password just as it has been for you.  I had thought it was working, but I think what I was looking at was connections between two different Linux PCs, not a Linux PC with a Windows server.

As before, if I entered my main account name and password for the Windows account, it let me in, but anything else (like ‘guest’ for user ID with no password) did not work.  Clearly, this was not wholly on the Linux end, because this authentication was happening in Windows.  Linux has no idea what the Windows account password is supposed to be.  Something in there is causing Windows to ignore the setting to allow access to everyone.  Linux doesn’t pop up the password dialog just because– it does it because Windows demands a password.

Is your Vista the Pro or Ultimate edition by any chance?  If not, it will be necessary to find the registry entry that corresponds with the policy editor setting.  If it is Pro/Ultimate, this should hopefully do it!

Back on the Windows machine for this!

I found some things where people were saying that if the secpol.msc policy for NTLM authorization is at a setting that was previously supposed to fix things, now it unfixes them.  Hopefully it’s the same in Vista as in 7.

In Local Policies, then Security Options, if you go to “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication Level,” and set it to “Send NTLM2 response only,” that might do it by itself.   Mine was on “Send both NTLM and NTLM2, and use NTLM2 if negotiated.” That setting I had was described on two different sites as causing the password prompt on open shares.

While I was in there, I also changed “Network access: sharing and security model for local accounts” to “Guest only” and “Network access: Restrict anonymous access to named pipes and shares.”  I tried restarting the network service, but it didn’t help… so I just resorted to the Windows standby and restarted it.

Now it’s working as expected!  I was able to get into the shares without a password prompt on my desktop PC (KDE Neon) and my Core 2 Duo laptop (Mint 19 Cinnamon).  Both of those are based on Ubuntu 18.04.  I don’t know which of the three security policies did it, but it works.

On the Linux end, before I found this solution, I also reset my smb.conf to default and added the settings back in as needed.  I ended up with these settings for the pertinent bits (all in [global]):

workgroup = WORKGROUP
name resolve order = bcast lmhosts wins host
client max protocol = NT1
security = user
null passwords = yes
guest account = nobody
wins support = yes
server role = standalone server
obey pam restrictions = no

I have no idea if the wins support is needed. It was one of a bunch of things some people suggested that I tried to get it working, and it works now, so I am reluctant to touch it. I have the Linux winbind package installed as well (same deal… no idea if it makes any difference).

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Cybertooth

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@ascaris, great that you got it to work–congratulations!

At my end, there’s a bit more to do yet, because the Vista version is Home and not Pro or Ultimate. So it may be necessary to find the registry keys that correspond to the Group Policy settings that you described. (I’m not averse to working in the registry, though of course I won’t go in and start changing things willy-nilly.)

An initial search in the registry didn’t give any results for “ntlm”.

I reviewed the settings in smb.conf that you listed, and changed the ones that didn’t match what you gave. Now, when clicking on Samba Shares in Dolphin it seems to look around a little longer than before, but it still ends up saying that it can’t find a workgroup.

 

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Here are the registry equivalents.  The values should already be present, so you would only need to double click them, select the radio button for decimal, then enter the decimal number specified.  If any of them don’t exist, you would need to go to the specified key, right click the right panel background, and select create new dword, then click decimal and enter the number.

As always, use caution with the registry editor.  Might be a good idea to set a restore point first if you’re not confident about editing the registry.

For the policy “Network Security: LAN Manager authentication Level,” set to “Send NTLM2 response only,” the registry setting is:

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa

Value: LmCompatibilityLevel = dword:00000003 (or 3 decimal)

For “Network access: sharing and security model for local accounts” set to “Guest only”, the registry setting is:

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa   (the same key as before)

Value: forceguest = dword:00000001 (or 1 decimal)

For “Network access: Restrict anonymous access to named pipes and shares”, set to Disabled, the registry setting is:

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanManServer\Parameters\

Value: RestrictNullSessAccess = dword:00000000 (or 0 decimal)\

Good luck!

Keep in mind that these settings are not great for security, but we’re attempting to set up an open network, where there is no security anyway, so we know this.  Anyone else reading this, do not use these settings if you are attempting to set up a network that is in any way secure.

 

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Thanks, ascaris.

After setting a restore point, I made the registry changes, then waited 20 minutes and clicked on Samba Shares. Still getting the same result about being unable to find a workgroup.

Do I maybe need to reboot the Vista PC following the registry changes?

(Update–rebooted Vista PC, and it made no difference.)

 

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Those fixes in the registry were about getting rid of the password prompt.  The browsing issue is another problem.

If you enter ‘smbtree’ in the Linux terminal, does it show all the shares?

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Typing smbtree in Konsole has no apparent result. After a few seconds of nothing visible happening, I’m back at the command prompt (or whatever that’s called in Linux).

Man, this is a thorny issue.

 

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Wow, that result from smbtree was unexpected.  Even after I reset my smb.conf file back to default, so that it again was not showing any of the shares (or the workgroup– I got the “no workgroups” error too) as expected, smbtree still showed everything.

Smbtree is smarter than whatever it is that connects Samba to Dolphin (GVFS?) in that it is able to drop to SMB1 to enable NetBIOS and get the list of shares, then switch back up to whatever the default is.

So on your system, it’s showing that there is nothing known to the network.  Are there any other shares on the network besides the one(s) in Windows Vista?

What does smbtree -d3 show?

These registry edits for the Windows server are shown on a few pages as being helpful sometimes.  I checked my Windows PC earlier and it already had the modified values in place, which was expected, as I thought I remembered doing the edits before.

The solution – regedit — change the following
Computer\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\LanmanServer\Parameters
Size – from 1 to 3
Computer\HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
LargeSystemCache – from 0 to 1

There is also this how-to from the Ubuntu Forum.

Can you access the shares by smb://192.168.x.x without the password prompt now?  That’s a different problem than not being able to see the shares, but at least it would indicate one of the dragons is slain.

 

 

 

 

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@ascaris, here are the results of the various suggestions:

Can you access the shares by smb://192.168.x.x without the password prompt now?  That’s a different problem than not being able to see the shares, but at least it would indicate one of the dragons is slain.

Entering that in Dolphin now results in a message that reads, “The file or folder smb://192.168.1.xxx/ does not exist.”

What does smbtree -d3 show?

This is the output [MODS: please remove any remaining info that might be sensitive]

lp_load_ex: refreshing parameters

Initialising global parameters

rlimit_max: increasing rlimit_max (1024) to minimum Windows limit (16384)

Processing section “[global]”

WARNING: The “null passwords” option is deprecated

WARNING: The “syslog” option is deprecated

added interface eno1 ip=192.168.1.xxx bcast=192.168.1.xxx netmask=255.255.255.0

tdb(/var/cache/samba/gencache.tdb): tdb_open_ex: could not open file /var/cache/samba/gencache.tdb: Permission denied

name_resolve_bcast: Attempting broadcast lookup for name WORKGROUP<0x1d>

resolve_lmhosts: Attempting lmhosts lookup for name WORKGROUP<0x1d>

name_resolve_bcast: Attempting broadcast lookup for name WORKGROUP<0x1b>

resolve_lmhosts: Attempting lmhosts lookup for name WORKGROUP<0x1b>

resolve_wins: using WINS server 127.0.0.1 and tag ‘*’

name_resolve_bcast: Attempting broadcast lookup for name __MSBROWSE__<0x1>

(I’m adding these short paragraphs to better set off consecutive sets of quotations.) Now here’s the answer to…

So on your system, it’s showing that there is nothing known to the network.  Are there any other shares on the network besides the one(s) in Windows Vista?

Yes, there a Windows 7 laptop that’s also visible (to the other Windows PCs) in the network.

Finally, regarding the new registry edits, I made them, then rebooted and tried to find the Samba shares from Kubuntu. This time there was a little bit of progress: I’m still getting the same (non-)results when trying the Samba shares or typing in the IP address or the computer name, but this time when I clicked on Network in Dolphin, it found the printer that the Vista PC shares to the network.

Hope this yields at least some clue as to how to go from here.

 

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Cybertooth wrote:

Entering that in Dolphin now results in a message that reads, “The file or folder smb://192.168.1.xxx/ does not exist.

Gah! I was getting that too.  Dolphin isn’t giving a particularly useful error message there.  When I tried it in my Mint Cinnamon PC, I got a more useful (and more searchable) “Failed to retrieve share list from server: Invalid argument.”

Even worse, I don’t remember in particular what fixed that.  It was one of the changes on the Windows PC end, though, not in Linux, and that was right when I did the secpol.msc edits that made it all start working.

I’m able to access the share on Windows 7 from all of my Linux PCs, including my Dell Inspiron running Manjaro KDE, and it has only one line in its smb.conf under Global– ‘client max protocol =  NT1’.   It does not have the Samba package installed, so it is not able to create shares, but it is able to see them on the LAN and connect to them.  All of the other settings are the defaults (Manjaro defaults may differ a bit from Ubuntu), and it works.

It seems to me that saying the file is not found is a step in the wrong direction as opposed to asking for a password.

As we keep trying more things that end up not working, I worry that the configurations are getting more and more loaded with junk (it’s junk because it didn’t work).  The Linux config is easy to reset to defaults, since the unmodified smb.conf file is at /usr/share/samba, so all you would need to do is copy it back to /etc/samba (and then modify it again, at the very least to add in client max protocol = NT1, since the default client max protocol does not permit browsing in Ubuntu 18.04), but the Windows registry scatters the settings all over the place.  I would try reverting the registry settings I suggested, starting with the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\LmCompatibilityLevel one (then a reboot on the Vista machine) to see if it is any better.  Vista may be the one use case mentioned before where the original setting was better.

I can set the policy in secpol.msc and see what the registry entry changes to if you’re not sure what it was before.

As for the smb.conf, I think I have a good configuration that doesn’t change too much from the defaults unnecessarily, but clearly contains what is needed, in my case at least, since it is working now.  Here’s what I have in [global] now:

[global]
client max protocol = NT1
log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
map to guest = Bad User
max log size = 1000
name resolve order = bcast lmhosts wins host
null passwords = Yes
pam password change = Yes
panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d
passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* .
passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u
security = USER
server role = standalone server
server string = %h server (Samba, Ubuntu)
syslog = 0
unix password sync = Yes
usershare allow guests = Yes
usershare owner only = No
wins support = Yes
idmap config * : backend = tdb
include = /etc/samba/dhcp.conf

WINS support is probably not needed here, but it’s working now, so I tend to want to keep it as is.

Through this whole thing, I am patently aware of how little I know about the specifics of what’s going on with SMB, and how someone who actually knows the nitty gritty would be more helpful, but when I search the web, I just see more people stabbing around in the dark like I am.  I also don’t have a Vista PC to use as a test, and I have to hope that 7 is similar enough to apply.

So, onward.  We have some interesting results from the smbtree -d3 command.

Cybertooth wrote:

name_resolve_bcast: Attempting broadcast lookup for name WORKGROUP<0x1d>

This is the NetBIOS broadcast, and it should be showing something here, but it’s not.. it just moves on to lmhosts.  In effect, the Linux PC is shouting to all of the other PCs on the network and asking, “Hey, is anyone out there a member of WORKGROUP?”

…crickets…

Every member of WORKGROUP that “hears” the broadcast should respond, “I am!  My name is NAME and I’m at IP 192.168.x.x.!”  Each one would then be listed in the smbtree results, and it would connect to each one in sequence and ask what shares it has available.  That’s what I see it doing on mine.

But that’s not happening, for some reason.  Either that broadcast is not making it to the other PCs or their responses are not making it back to the Linux PC.  The $64,000 question is why.

Cybertooth wrote:

name_resolve_bcast: Attempting broadcast lookup for name __MSBROWSE__<0x1>

This appears to be the Linux PC asking, “Who is the master browser?”  The master browser should respond, but again, nothing (assuming there was no response below that line, since that was where the quotation ended).

The master browser can be any PC in the network.  It’s the master browser’s job to maintain an active share list of all of the other PCs, and to make that list available to any other PC that joins the network.  Sometimes the master browser becomes unavailable… it could be any PC, so maybe it gets turned off or rebooted.  When that happens, the remaining PCs will realize the master browser is not responding, and they will hold an election to decide who the new master browser will be.  Each PC has a certain priority based on a number of factors, and they compare priority levels.  If one has a priority higher than the rest, it wins the election.  If more than one PC has the same priority level, they draw straws, so to speak, to determine the winner.

The winner becomes the new master browser, handling all of the share list distribution quietly in the background.  The user of that PC is not aware it is the master browser… from his perspective, it’s just the same as all of the other PCs on the network.

The system works this way because it’s meant to function on a network that doesn’t have a dedicated leader that is on all the time like a domain controller.  Any PC can be the master browser, and if that one disappears from the network, someone else gets the job.  There should never be NO master browser for very long, if things are working properly.

In the Windows PC, if you type ‘net view’ into the command prompt window, it should give you the list of shares it knows about, similar to smbtree in Linux. If you then enter ‘nbtstat -a NAME’ for each PC name from net view, one should contain the MSBROWSE string we saw Linux looking for with the smbtree -d3 command. Perhaps the Windows machine or machines know of a master browser the Linux machine can’t talk to for some reason.

Is the ‘client max protocol = NT1″ statement still in there in smb.conf under [global]? I had it without ‘client’ before, but the “official” way is to have it in there, and that’s how I have my setup now, and it’s working, so it seems like a good baseline.

SMB is so convoluted and fiddly about this stuff.  Setting Windows shares to be open, with no password required, doesn’t mean what it says, at least not all the time.  It clearly sometimes still demands a password, even if there isn’t one.  It was a change to the Windows PC settings that made Linux stop asking for a password, not a change within the Linux config.

One last shot in the dark: Is it possible the router is filtering the LAN traffic for some reason?  How are the machines connected to the network… cabled or wireless?

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Well, this is SOOOOO embarrassing…

I remembered that when I first set up the Kubuntu machine last year, I sought to fortify its defenses, feeling unsure that a Linux computer could “just be” on the Internet and stay safe without the kinds of measures that we Windows refugees are used to. So I installed UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) and then GUFW (the graphical front-end for UFW).

As soon as I disabled the firewall today, suddenly clicking on Samba Shares in Dolphin brought up the workgroup, and both the Windows 7 laptop and the Vista PC made their appearance.

(When Dophin was complaining about a firewall, I kept thinking it might be a Windows firewall issue, on the idea that the Linux machine was trying to talk to THEM and they were preventing it.)

Now clicking on the laptop still brings up a request for a password. Since I take it places with me, this machine does have a password set to get into Windows, and the password worked. Yeah!!

However, clicking on the icon for the Vista machine (which doesn’t have a password set) is still bringing up the bit about “The file or folder smb://xxxxxx-xx/ does not exist.”

Entering smbtree -d3 now outputs a whole mess of information for both of the above machines (there are others on the network, too).

By using nbtstat on each computer in the network successively, I also found out that the laptop is the one serving as the master browser. Thank you for the interesting and informative discussion of master browsers, that was completely new to me.

Maybe, as you suggested, it’s time to start undoing some of the registry and smb.conf changes. But I’ll wait for your thoughts on the above before proceeding.

 

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You know, I was thinking that I should probably ask if there was a firewall that had been installed.  I stopped at “Ubuntu doesn’t come with a firewall” and for some reason never considered that one may have been installed anyway.

In all of the searching I have done for this issue (and happy to do it… I want to learn more about this stuff too), I came across a command for Linux to find out of there is a firewall, and I almost linked it, but for some reason I didn’t.

Anyway, glad the browsing bit works now.

I never bothered with the Linux firewall that comes preinstalled with Mint, but it was always sort of on the “to do someday” list.  It’s not a bad idea, but they can be a pain.  I’ve always used Windows firewalls with very tight rulesets, and it’s always the first thing I suspect when there is any network issue.  For me, though, the firewall was more about outbound filtering, since I am always behind a router or access point anyway, and that will firewall it quite nicely.

NAT (network address translation) is a standard feature of just about all IPv4 LANs that automatically provides protection against unsolicited incoming packets (the kind that an inbound firewall would protect against).  With NAT, it’s not possible for a computer out there somewhere on the web to initiate a connection to a PC on your network.  All computers outside the LAN can see is the WAN IP, which is the IP of the router.  If they send a packet to that IP, the router would have no idea which PC on the LAN to send it to, so it would drop it.  (If you need a PC on the LAN to accept incoming connections, you can use port forwarding for that, but it’s not usually needed on home networks, and can be risky, since it opens a hole in the firewall.)

Responses to connections initiated by a PC on the LAN are different.  TCP/IP connections (like HTTP connections) are stateful connections (both PCs are aware that the connection has been opened), so the connection opened by your PC is the same one the remote PC uses to connect back to you.  The router is transparent in this, so the remote PC isn’t aware of it (the router).

With stateless connection types like UDP/IP, the router remembers that a given packet was sent by a given PC on the LAN to a given IP address at a specific time.  When it gets a response, it knows where to send it on the LAN.  The most common use of UDP is DNS, but it has many other uses too.

TCP/IP connections are like a phone call, where both parties are aware of the connection once it has been initiated successfully, and can use it continuously until one party closes it, while UDP/IP packets are like text messages.  The originating PC just sends it to the IP address in question and off it goes, hopefully to get to where it is going… there’s no “connected” state, and the sending PC gets no confirmation that it arrived until the remote PC responds.  The remote PC is (for want of a better word) “surprised” by the incoming packet, in that no connection was negotiated beforehand.

A firewall on a PC would be much more important if that PC itself hosted the internet connection without NAT (so the WAN IP is the one that shows up as the local IP).  If I were doing that, I’d definitely install and configure a firewall even in Linux.

As for undoing the changes, I would still suggest trying the smb.conf I am using as above (and then restart smbd with ‘sudo service smbd restart’ on the command line), since it is working (on three PCs now… my Neon desktop, my Swift Neon laptop, and my Core 2 Duo Mint Cinnamon laptop, all versions based on Ubuntu 18.04).  If it is still giving the error message that it can’t find the file or folder when trying to access the Vista PC shares, then try the registry change back to original (and reboot the Vista PC).

We’re gonna get this!

 

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@ascaris, thank you for sticking with me! I’m glad that you too have found this discussion useful and educational.

I reviewed the smb.conf file, and adjusted it to match what you have. A few changes involved changing “yes” to “Yes”, but the most substantial changes were to add these two lines, which I didn’t have before:

idmap config * : backend = tdb
include = /etc/samba/dhcp.conf

Instead of the second line above, my smb.conf file had “include = home/samba/etc/smb.conf %m” but commented out with a semi-colon.

The outcome is the same, no better than before. I’ll have to try reverting the Vista registry settings, if I can find where I wrote down the previous values for those keys…

 

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Update on reply 227754:

I started undoing the Vista registry settings. LmCompatibilityLevel didn’t need to change, as it was already at 3 which I have learned is the default value.

Next, I changed LargeSystemCache from 1 back to 0, rebooted, and clicked on Samba Shares is Kubuntu once the  boot process settled down: Dolphin is still saying that the smb “file or folder” does not exist.

Waited 20 minutes and tried it again: same result, no improvement.

Then I reverted LanmanServer\Parameters Size and rebooted: no improvement. Waited 20 minutes and tried again: same thing.

 

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It was already 3 before all of this?  Ok… that’s interesting!

Did you change forceguest in the same key to 1? That was one of the three policies I edited right about when it stopped saying “file or folder not found” for me.

 

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Yup, forceguest had been set to 1. I forgot to change that one back to 0, so now it too is done. Dolphin still finding the Vista PC in the workgroup, but claiming there is no smb: folder.

Regarding LmCompatibilityLevel, I opened Regedit on my Vista laptop and confirmed that the value (which I’ve never messed with on that machine) is in fact 3.

So we are back at the original registry settings for the Vista PC.

 

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I was just in the process of adding more info to the previous post when I saw that you’d replied… so I will leave that one alone for continuity, and add the new stuff here.

I went back to my Windows PC and changed all three of those settings I linked above to the way they were before I started all of this, then rebooted, and… it’s still not showing the error I used to get, the one you are having now (not found).

In the midst of that, I saw another entry under secpol.msc that I had changed, and it was one that I had not mentioned here.  I wonder what else I may have missed…?

When I reverted that one to default, it once again began to ask for the password for my “open” shares.  Aha!

It’s HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\EveryoneIncludesAnonymous

it’s set to 0 by default.  See, when I set a share to allow ‘everyone’, I would think it actually means everyone, but apparently you’re not part of everyone if you’re not logged in.  That’s the kind of convoluted nonsense that I get annoyed by.  Open shares that are only open under certain circumstances, words that don’t mean what they plainly mean, that kind of thing.

I set that to 1 and I was able to get in without a password prompt.

As a part of this whole thing, I had (a couple of days ago) also gone to my Windows PC and made sure the permissions for each share included “everyone” in the whitelist.  Which, at the time, I thought actually meant everyone.  Now it actually does, with this registry entry set. I also made sure ‘guest’ was in the list for each share (I have five on the Windows 7 machine).

Now, about that pesky ‘not found’ error… FWIW, a workaround: when I was getting the same error, I was still able to log into the share by bypassing the share list like this:

smb://PCNAME/SHARENAME

rather than just by PCNAME, which usually makes it download the share list and display the shares available.  If you go right to the share, you don’t need the share list (the thing that is ‘not found’ for whatever reason).

If the EveryoneIncludesAnonymous registry value and/or the permission changes (if any) fix it, that’s great!  Otherwise, since that LMCompatibilityLevel was already 3, I’d like to try 1 and see what happens.

If it still gives the ‘file or folder not found’ error, please type ‘smbclient -L PCNAME’ into the Linux terminal, replacing PCNAME with the name of the Vista PC, and copy/paste the output here.

We’re close, I can feel it…

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@ascaris, you did it!!!

Changing the EveryoneIncludesAnonymous setting and then rebooting, totally did the trick: I can now browse in Dolphin to the Public folders on the Vista PC and see what’s in there. I even clicked on a file there and was able to open it without issue.

I didn’t need to try any of the other ideas you offered in your last post, this one took care of things.

Problem solved–thank you so much!!

 

P.S. As a bonus, now the Kubuntu machine’s shared folders also show up in Vista’s Windows Explorer and I can browse them equally well as in the other direction. This was not possible previously.

 

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Great!  I’m glad it worked.

See how strange and convoluted SMB can be?  A Windows PC can browse open shares on another Windows PC openly, but if you try to access the same share with a Linux PC, Windows demands a password it should know doesn’t exist, indicating that open doesn’t always mean open and ‘everyone’ doesn’t really mean everyone?

In the research I did for this issue, I saw a few people criticize Samba as unnecessarily complex, but I wonder if that’s really not just the underlying complexity of SMB itself showing through.

It is a concern, since the way this odyssey started was with Klaas Vaak expressing concern that several things, including networking, were troublesome or do not work properly in Linux.  He does not seem to have followed this branch of the thread, but if he had, he may well have concluded that the networking concerns were correct, even though it turned out not to be anything wrong with Linux.

This fix ended up being on the Windows end, but even before this change, unauthenticated Windows clients were able to access the share without setting the EveryoneIncludesAnonymous registry entry in question.  Since those Windows clients are, in fact, anonymous, it would seem that they are behaving incorrectly if the Windows server was set to not apply “everyone” permissions to guests. Or maybe not… if open doesn’t always mean open and everyone doesn’t mean everyone, there could be any number of other exceptions that change the rules even more.

Obviously, in any Windows-to-Linux networking that doesn’t work as expected in an instance where Windows does work, Linux will get the blame, even if Windows happened to be implementing the spec incorrectly (and I am not saying they are, just speculating).  Regardless of the on-paper spec, the spec that people care about the most is the “does it work” spec.  If Windows to Windows works (even if it is because MS put in some kind of “kludge” to work around a bug) but Linux (client) to Windows (server) does not, people will give Linux a “fail.”

I am not so certain anymore, but I could swear I have had anonymous shares on that Windows 7 server working in Linux without setting that registry value, the same way we observed Windows clients working with it.  That was before the jump to versions of Neon or Mint based on Ubuntu 18.04.  That was a big jump, where SMBv1 was turned off by default for the first time, in line with what MS did with Windows 10.  If there was such a hypothetical kludge to make things work with much older implementations of SMB in Windows (Vista and 7 are both quite old), it may have been removed at that same time, since the focus was changed from older Windows to newer Windows.  I wonder if we would have had these same issues if we’d been using Windows 10 as a server (in other words, new Windows with new Linux rather than old Windows with new Linux), or if we had tried Windows 10 as a client accessing the share.

Anyway, I’m glad it works!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
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Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Cybertooth

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@ascaris, excellent discussion as usual, and pertinent questions regarding whether “new” Linux would network more seamlessly with “new” Windows. Although, after this experience, I’m not eager to try and find out. 

My hope is that the arrangement keeps working (networking) without further issues. We’ll see!

Thanks once more for taking the time and interest to investigate this knotty problem.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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You’re very welcome.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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I forgot to answer your question about testparm. Here’s what I got:

Load smb config files from /etc/samba/smb.conf

rlimit_max: increasing rlimit_max (1024) to minimum Windows limit (16384)

WARNING: The”null passwords” option is deprecated

WARNING: The “syslog” option is deprecated

Processing section “[printers]”

Processing section “[print$]”

Loaded services file OK.

WARNING: The ‘netbios name’ is too long (max. 15 chars).

Server role: ROLE_STANDALONE

Press enter to see a dump of your service definitions

Please note that, FWIW, I ran testparm only after making the settings changes you proposed.

 

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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@Ascaris: thank you for your extensive answer, I appreciate it.

I replied earlier but am not sure it will be published since I was accidentally logged out, which I only noticed after I submitted it. Anyway, here is a repeat.

I have had Linux Mint Mate installed (could not get Cinnamon to work) in an Oracle VirtualBox guest on a Windows host since February. I played a bit with it, left it, then restarted last week. I have not had any major issues with it (neither with WiFi, nor trackpad, nor anything else), but am I right in saying that running it from a USB is different?

In other words, my next step should be running it from a USB before installing it on my hard disk?

I must admit I am nervous about a hard disk installation and running it instead of Windows; after all, changing OS is a bigger step than changing Office suite.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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One thing a VirtualBox VM is not useful for, is testing for hardware support – because in that case all it sees for hardware is the VM.

(Well, actually, you could test for generic trackpad support or some such in a VM even if you don’t have a real trackpad, because you can fake it in the VM config, but…)

Running from USB, you do get the actual hardware and can do device driver testing.

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To me, the advantage of running from a USB stick is to see whether you like the Distribution you’ve chosen before installing it on your hard drive. It’ll also let you know if your basic hardware is going to work. When I installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on the hard drives of my laptops, I was given the option during installation of wiping everything from my hard drive and having only Ubuntu on it or keeping Windows and having a dual boot system (during the boot up you are basically asked which you want to start, Windows or Ubuntu). I chose a dual boot on one machine and a Ubuntu only on the other. I had no particular reason for that choice; I was just curious about how it all worked. As I recall I was also given the choice of some other hard drive partitions, etc., none of which I fully understood. I will let others more knowledgeable than I discuss the pros and cons of dual boot versus virtual machine installations.

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One significant thing that Linux on USB sticks is used for, is diagnostics and repair – it can deal with all kinds of weird things with at the very least more data in the error messages than the usual with Windows…

One major “pro” thing for VM is that you can have both running simultaneously – or just the host. The obivous “con” from there is that when running the VM, you then have to support the processing overhead from both, even before counting for losses to the VM subsystem (which can be quite variable, depending). Also only need to have drivers for the actual hardware on the host side, the VM only sees the VM subsystem, in the usual case.

Another “con” is that while Linux would tend to be the better choice for host on the technical side (really, I have a bunch of still-good hardware where the Windows drivers have been EOL for a while now but Linux drivers are still officially vendor-supported and all, and that’s not getting into I/O schedulers and disk management) Windows licensing for VM guest use can be a bother.

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I agree with the other people who responded to your question.

Running in a VM is different than using a USB drive to boot it on your machine for two reasons: First, the VM’s virtualized hardware is not the same as the hardware on your PC, so you can’t test the overall compatibility, and second, the VM is a persistent environment (although you can also make it non-persistent if you wish) where the USB live session isn’t.  You can simulate making changes in the live session for some things, like installing a program for you to use for that session.  It should install and run without a problem as long as it does not use up all the space in the RAM disk, but it will be gone as soon as you turn off the PC.   The same goes for any system settings you change. They will work for that session, but they will go back to defaults the next time you start a live session.

The live session is also how you run the Linux installer.  Some Linux distros present you with a choice at first boot, asking you if you want to install Linux now or try it out, while others will simply start the live session and leave a “Install Linux now” icon on the desktop.  Some will do both!

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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Klaas Vaak

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@Ascaris: thanks for explaining that. The way I see it is that using a VM is a 1st, exploratory step. The next step, getting closer to the “real” thing is from a USB stick to get a feeling for a live environment, although the non-persistence does strike me as a real pain.

The last step would be a full installation to dual boot, only to avoid the Windows licensing issue in case one would want to run Windows in a VM.

1x Linux Mint 19.1 | 1x Linux antiX

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One notable thing that is a bother with Linux is Broadcom wireless adapters.

This is because Broadcom’s license doesn’t allow redistribution of some necessary components without specific authorization, which is in turn is incompatible with the GPL’s requirement of not limiting redistribution… so with those, the usual way is to install the thing with a wired network attached and after installation, do a “sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer” to help you get the missing pieces directly from Broadcom.

(Yes, you can find that in the additional drivers section from the graphical interface too, but explaining that tends to be a lot more work than one command line…)

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Cybertooth and Ascaris, thank you both. It was an absolute pleasure reading you these last few days running down an open network problem that culminated here. I learned tech and enjoyed the exchange.

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Cybertooth, Ascaris

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