Share Files over the Network - What packages?

Question

I see a pop up that says

Share Files over the Network

This feature cannot be enabled because the required packages are not installed on your system

Simple enough, but what packages do I need?

Solution 1

what worked for me was install Apache2. Just install a LAMP server (or just apache) --

sudo apt-get install apache2

Then it should work just fine.

---

In 16.04 the change is from

to

Solution 2

When you share files over the network in Ubuntu, you use samba - so you'll need to run sudo apt-get install samba and then try sharing the folder again.

Comments

[Admin]

I have samba installed and am still getting the message above

[Bobby]

Not necessarily...I'd suggest NFS for a pure Linux environment. Though, AFAIK Samba is default choice of Ubuntu.

[jrg]

@Allan True. @Bobby Yeah. Samba isn't necessarily the best way to do this, but it's the default choice.

[Luis Alvarado]

He is not trying to share it via HTTP. He is trying to share it like in windows. In this case the answer by jrg is the correct one.

[brianpeiris]

Apparently apache2 is required for the Ubuntu's file sharing feature to work.

[XavierStuvw]

Using 16.04 here. I have first installed samba (and dependencies using synaptic) to no effect. I then apache2, again delegating to synaptic; it then activated the network activities. I have edited the post above to display the change in the Personal File Sharing Preference dialogue window (pending moderator's approval)