I'm ecstatically happy with my 12.04 on my laptop after loading it over my MS Vista... but there's just one thing, one little fly in the ointment.... While I can view our 2 Terabyte, shared hard-drive in the lounge (and copy files back and forth) I can't see my PC (when I boot up in Ubuntu 12.04) nor the Lubuntu computer connected to the TV (for movies, Youtube etc).

Printing to the HP office jet on the PC doesnt work over the network either.

Have had one dubious flirtation with Samba, which seems to be the only thing I've found that will 'work', however halfway through that "installation" everything just ground to a halt, the directions began to stop making sense...

I was working from this page.

Our Network consists of the following:

Our Internet service is wirelessly sent to us from our provider to our dish on a pole.

It comes into the house via an ethernet cable.

We split it there to a phone, and to 6 other destinations (bedrooms, computers, and to another splitter in the lounge which has a wifi antennae and 4 ethernet ports).

• one port goes to the Lubuntu OS PC which is connected to the TV
• the second port goes to the 2 Terabyte harddrive (MS powered 'Mybooklive')
• (the other two are empty)

My Ubuntu 12.04 laptop connects wirelessly to this splitter in the lounge.

I know just enough about computers to get myself into an awful mess without too much trouble

We usually can view friends' laptops when they get on our network (as they are invariably MS OS's) Our flatmate, who introduced us to Linux's computer is also invisible

How can we make our Linux OS based computers visible on the network and share files and printing?