Agreed direct USB is much quicker. But mounting is awesome if you want access to some media or files on your local pc and don't want to load it onto your device.

Yes man look up cifs.

Simply share the drive or folder on the windows machine and then mount it on the N900 using cifs.

That works. I dual-boot my Mac as well (rEFIt rocks!). OSX for work and then Linux for home is how I do it.

OK so this one interested me enough to register. Been a N900 user for two months now and lurking around here for a couple of weeks.
First off, Can’t believe some of the replies; why the questions around why you wanna do this. Because it should be possible must be enough of a reason for a toy like the N900. Second, I would find it really useful if an easy way existed to hook to shared drives in an XP/Vista/7 environment. PC-Connectivity sounds promising but difficult. VPN is overkill. SSH is mysterious to an old DOS guy like myself. What I want is to be able to just browse the local subnet and be able to copy, move delete, stream files without being cable attached to the computer / disk. Anyone? There are a lot of good programmers here. I would be willing to pay for an app that gave me the ability to browse above the N900 but within the constraints of the home network.

And of course. Not to hijack the thread but my battery time improved dramatically as well a couple of days ago. Don’t know which package / update it was that made it. I’m scratching my head about what I have installed / removed put can’t pinpoint anything.

Look at this thread

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=38536

Shadow12. Got it. Thanks.

The movies are averaging 700mb in size, so transferring that over WiFi wouldn't be a problem. And if I'm downstairs and I want to grab some movie / music, I'd like the option to just jump on my external drive and grab what I wanted, not schlep up the stairs, log in, connect cable, look around, drag-drop, wait to finish, etc. Just thought it would be convenient/cool to be connected to it.

I wonder what's the fuss about streaming music and videos from a network drive...I've got a network drive, N900 and streaming works just fine OUT-OF-THE-BOX...just hook up to your Wi-Fi, start the media player and you should see your network drive also...copying files is a different matter, I don't need that. And if I have to copy files I'll use the cable...it is, after all, a working solution.

EDIT: Just a little bit off-topic, read the thread again and it seems that I missed the point a bit. But hey, streaming works out-of-the-box...isn't that something!

i am connected to wifi but when i go on the media player my network drive does not show up.i do however have my pc and laptop showing up at the bottom of the media player but i am not sharing anything from them

Gosh that is an ugly how to. We need to get Samba ported to Maemo 5 ASAP. Hopefully once I figure out this sandbox thing I can get it recompiled thehehe

~Jeff