I have an ancient SONY NW-507 MP3 player (I still love it because of the 60hrs battery life) that the MP3 Manager software just interpret ANSI names encoded in the ID3 tag based on whatever system language the program started on.
I used to use AppLocale for that. There was a better variant called pAppLocale (or paip Applocale) but it’s no longer maintained anymore. Today I discovered a modern, much more powerful equivalent called Locale Emulator.
Windows 10 cannot access network file shares of older Windows (7 and before) out of the box, and I’m not impressed that Microsoft let millions of users waste their productivity to figure it out.
The issue is caused by SMB negotiatons. Basically at the time of writing, there are 3 major versions of SMB:
| Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 | Windows 7 / 2008 | Windows 8 / 10 | |
| SMB v1 (No encryption) | Default | Default (for backward compatibility) | Need to turn on SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support |
| SMB v2 | X | Enable SMB2 in registry (for 2008) | Default (for backward compatibility) |
| SMB v3 | X | X | Default |
More accurately, this blog post provides the negotiation chart for up to Windows 8 (think of Windows 10 is the same for now).
Turn on SMB 1.0 in newer Windows (8, 10 and above):
The SMB v1 does not have encryption, therefore a security risk. Makes sense to disable it unless there’s a compelling reason (like obsolete industrial computer under tightly controlled network).
SMB v2 might need to be enabled by registry in Windows 2008 if not already done so:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters SMB2 (DWORD): 1 for enable, 0 for disable
This web page tells you how to turn on/off each SMB version individually.
I tried Ubuntu on my old laptop, but it was unbearably much slower than that Windows 7 so I was looking for lightweight options. After some shopping, I settled on MX Linux as the drivers worked right of out the box for the hardware and it gave me the best user experience so far.
Other than responsiveness, the deciding factor that moves me away from Ubuntu is the amount work required to get the basic things working out of the box. Internationalization is almost fully configured in MX Linux, while I had to jump a few hoops to get the VL Gothic (Japanese) font in and struggled to get the IME to switch using Ctrl+Space / Ctrl+Shift (or any default shortcut keys) like in Windows. In MX Linux, they are the defaults right away.
I was really turned off by the fact that Ubuntu’s (minimal install) default Archive Manager is half-working out of the box: I get weird errors and partial success extracting RAR files because unrar was not installed by default! It just showed the lack of consideration about user experience.
MX Linux defaults to ibus, which works right out of the box with mozc (Japanese) language support. But I’d like to have a Cantonese IME that allows me to swear (the ibus-table-cantonese package was censored), so I opted for Andrew Choi’s CAP, which runs on fcitx. He used to have an iBus version, but it was a decade ago and I couldn’t get it to install.
Turns out it’s not that MX Linux is not that prepared when you want to use Fctix. None of the languages shows up when I tried to add an IME! After a lot of googling, I realized it requires im-config, and you need to install zenity before installing im-config!
After that fcitx works like a charm: mozc, CAP works in harmony, and I can turn the IME on/off by Ctrl+Space and switch between IMEs using Ctrl+Shift (just like in the old days)
EDIT: After all the praise I have on MX Linux. I noticed it overlooked something very basic! It does not make you configure timezone during setup and it’s not easy to change it! To do it the GUI way, first you have to go to “MX Time Settings”, and you have to type in the EXACT timezone string (TZ database name)! Geeze! It’s so caveman that we still have to do this in 2019!!
How did I noticed that I forgot to change the timezone? I realized the time in my Windows keeps getting changed (suspiciously a time-zone offset like difference) after I booted into MX Linux and boot back to Windows. That’s insidious!
I normally disable “Computer Browser” service in Windows by default because multiple computers having it on causes errors showing up in event log complaining there are multiple masters, and it’s not necessary for my simple home network because I’m just using a workgroup (no domain controller).
However, today I found out that even after setting up MX Linux’s Samba correctly (see below), if none of the computers on my windows network runs “Computer Browser”, my Windows computer name will not show up in “Thunar File Manager” although I can access it with smb://, and linux computers running Samba server shows up fine.
There’s also another twist to get the SMB client to work in Thunar File Manager. Despite smbtree works right out of the box (it detects the Windows shares), I’ll have to add this line in /etc/samba/smb.conf for the file manager to even probe the list of computers (not timeout):
name resolve order = bcast host
The point is to use broadcast lookup BEFORE dns lookup. DNS lookups for my local resources are often temperamental (could it be my router?), and I saw Linux Mint working with Windows briefly without these settings (editing smb.conf and also enabling “Computer Browser” service in Windows), but it failed today even after I re-installed MX Linux from scratch.
The other lines mentioned like client max protocol = NT1 and netbios name mentioned on the forums are not needed.
After configuring it. Restart smbd:
sudo /etc/init.d/smbd restart