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I have a network hard drive that I want to access from my Linux system as well as some other computers that run Windows, but I have no idea how to go about doing this. The desktop environment Gnome has a "Browse Network" option, but it doesn't do anything at the moment. I've heard of NFS and Samba, but I'm having difficulties understanding how I'm supposed to configure them.

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If the drive is already accessible from Windows, then it most likely uses SMB, not NFS. To enable SMB (Samba) support in GNOME, make sure you have gvfs-smb, gvfs-backends or similar package installed. This should be enough to allow browsing the network.

If you know the drive's IP address, press Ctrl+L in the file manager, then enter smb://address next to Location.

To access it by name, you might need libnss_wins.so, which usually comes as part of samba or winbind packages. Once you have it, edit the "hosts:" line of /etc/nsswitch.conf; add "wins" as the last item. Some distributions will do it for you automatically.

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