The first thing I want to set up is to access files on another machine over the local network. I use a fairly simple Samba setup. The following steps are based on this Arch Wiki page.

First install samba and smbclient. Copy the example configuration file /etc/samba/smb.conf.default/ to /etc/samba/smb.conf. I only changed the line below:

name resolve order = lmhosts bcast host wins

because of the "Time Out" problem of Dolphin mentioned in this section. But the Dolphin's built-in Samba support is still very unusable. It is very slow and often can not even show the Samba server list completely. I use the command line tool smbclient instead.

In Arch's example configuration file, it enable user's home directory sharing by default. The situation of Ubuntu is a little different. You need to manually uncomment the [homes] part in Share Definitions. Now start the Samba server using systemctl start smbd nmbd and make them enable by default using systemctl enable smbd nmbd.

Next we need to grant users' access to the Samba drives. Using

smbpasswd -a qjp

will add the user qjp to the local smbpasswd file, and we can log into Samba drives as user qjp now. The server settings are all done.

Essentially there are no apparent settings required in client side. To see some useful information of a Samba server:

smbclient -L hostname -U username

Now we manually mount the remote drive to a local mountpoint, using one of the sharenames you see in the output of previous command:

sudo mount -t cifs //hostname/sharename /path/to/mountpoint -o
user=username,password=password,workgroup=WORKGROUP,uid=localusername,gid=localgroupname,ip=serverip

Since this command is executed using sudo, the uid and gid options are necessary as I want write-permission to the mountpoint as a regular user qjp, not root.

Now let us see a use case of how to work effectively by using Linux and Windows together.

I use \LaTeX{} to generate pdf files in Linux, and with a plugin named latex-preview-pane of Emacs, the pdf file will be automatically regenerated every time I save the modified \LaTeX{} source file. In order to make use of the large screen of the 27-inch monitor, I want to write \LaTeX{} source file in my ultrabook while viewing the generated pdf file in the Windows machine, which is connected to the 27-inch monitor.

While Evince and Okular all support auto-reloading of pdf files when they are changed in Linux, I only find that Sumatra PDF has the similar functionality in Windows(It is also said the Evince's Windows version has the auto-reloading feature but it doesn't work properly when I tested it). The problem here is when using Sumatra to view the pdf file in the drive of my Linux machine via Samba, Sumatra will not automatically reload the pdf file when I regenerate it. It is not wierd because in the OS level, the file change notification isn't sent to the Sumatra in time, that is, Sumatra doesn't know that this pdf file has already been regenerated so it won't reload it. It is Samba's fault. From Samba's documentation here, there is actually a global option in the Samba server, named change notify timeout, which defaults to 60 seconds. Making this number smaller seems to solve this problem. However, the documentation said "Performing these checks too often can slow down the server considerably", so it is not feasible to make it small enough in order to achieve the effect of instant updating of the pdf files.

Currently the best solution I could think of is to synchronize the generated pdf file between Linux and Windows. Then Sumatra will open the pdf file locally, and every time I regenerate the pdf file in Linux, the file should be copied to Windows instantly. The file synchronization tools such as Dropbox are not fast enough to achieve this, so writing a simple shell script would be better. There is a package named inotify-tools in Arch's official repository, which contains a tool that could monitor the state changes of a particular file or directory. You could find some examples here. The script I use for this case is really simple:

inotifywait -m -e close_write example.pdf | while read foo; do cp example.pdf
/path/to/mountpoint/Documents/example.pdf; done

inotifywait will monitor the close_write events of example.pdf. Once it is regenerated, copy the new file to Windows via Samba. Then Sumatra will reload the new pdf file. This process is very fast.