I have an old laptop running Ubuntu 9.10 which I use as a LAMP environment for web development, and I have a comfortable, powerful desktop computer with Windows 7 installed on it. These two are connected to a home router so both can access the internet.

I have been able to set up Samba so I can mount my Apache home directory so it is accessible from Windows and is mapped as a network drive.

What I'd like to do is access some Windows folders from Linux so I could automatically create backups (with cron scripts) of my work to physically different locations on the Windows box. Perhaps at a later time I'd set up a local Subversion repository but I'd love to keep backups of that on the Windows drives too.

Using Ubuntu's Places/Network menu I can see my desktop but I'm unable to log in to that despite having created the corrent username and password on Windows. All I can get is the following error message: "Unable to mount location. Failed to retrieve share list from server."

What could be misconfigurated?