First of all, I think it is important to point out that I am a complete newbie in the land of Linux. Having said that, I feel as though there is some secret little thing no one is telling me. I have a windows box with a shared folder, and other windows boxes can see it. I have Ubuntu 8.10, and although I can see the computer, I can not see the folder. Everything I have read on Google suggests that this should just work. I am very frustrated. A few months ago, I setup a different machine with Fedora and so did a friend of mine. According to him, he set up his machine exactly the same way I did, and yet he could see the shared folder and I could not. I suspect something so simple that no one has even mentioned it. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Have you installed Samba? Samba is the software that lets Linux talk to Windows shares (and vice versa).

If you're using KDE, fire up Konqueror and type:

smb://computername

I'm not sure sure about Gnome though. Stick 'samba' into the package manager and see what handy GUI tools come up to give you a boost.

Some more information.

I logged in as root and connected to the drive no problem. Then when I tried with my own account, not only did it not connect, but it locked out my windows account.

I later discovered that I could set the network file sharing permission for my use account, and then I was able to connect.

That was yesterday. Today, I tried the same thing and it locked my account out again.