All right, it’s not really one click, but sharing your files across a network is now easier than ever before. What I did here hasn’t been tested with Windows, but I suppose it should work okay with it as well since I used Samba. I can’t guarantee 100% compatibility with Windows since I didn’t have to edit any config files and didn’t have to drop down to the CLI to do any of the dirty work, which means I’m low on the gory details of what’s going on under the hood. Now let me cut to the chase.

sudo aptitude install samba

That installs Samba on your Ubuntu box. Now go to Nautilus and right click on the folder you want to share. There will be a “Sharing options” menu entry. Just enable sharing and guest access from the dialogue that pops up, and don’t give write permissions to everybody. The shares are showing up on my Mac (10.5). I’d have tested it with WinXP as well, but it’s currently on it’s monthly crash-vacation so I’ll have to wait until I get the time to reinstall.

Note that you’ll have to have root privileges to share anything outside of your home folder, unless you have given rw permissions to your user for accessing the contents of / (which is very stupid of you). Just hit ALT-F2 and type this to run Nautilus in superuser mode :

gksu nautilus

Now you can share anything on your filesystem.