I got my N800 for xmas, but have been browsing the site for the last year or so. I havn't felt the need to post until now as all the queations I had were already answered on the site, but this has me well & truly stumped.

I've just re-installed OS2008 onto the tablet after un-installing a program sent it into an endless reboot loop. Here's the programs I had installed before I noticed anything unusual..

vagalume
vc-epg-widget
osso-accounts-plugin-idle
videocenter-plugins
load-applet
publishr-maemo
maemo-wordpy
videocenter-ci-plugins-base
imagemagick
fbreader
maemo-mapper
rtcomm-beta-installer
libzlibrary
videocenter
isearch-edit
rtcom-beta-os2008
account-plugin-haze
wget
ogg-support
osso-accounts-plugin-salut
rsync
tuxpaint
telepathy-idle
camera
libhttrack1
telepathy-haze
libhunspell-1.1-0
transmission
openssh-client
gizmo-project
mplayer
maemo-ftp
abiword
webhttrack
libbz2-1.0
grsync
fmradio
telepathy-salut
maemoscrobbler
libenchant1c2a
osso-xterm

As you can see, nothing too network specific except maybe rtcom-beta-os2008 and the usual stuff.

I then installed isearch-edit to try & add desktop searches for different sites and made a new search for ISOhunt. After clicking on the button to choose the icon to use for the new link, the file manager came up and I was surprised to find my Linux home server (Ubuntu Dapper) and my WinXP games machines shares listed beneath my bluetooth link.

I did a quick test and found that I could indeed browse my WinXP shared folder. Unfortunately I got a little too excited and shut the program down to see if it would work a second time or if it was just a fluke.
I know.. I should have taken a screen shot and try to copy a file over etc. but you know how it is when you hit on something completely unexpected like this.

Anybody else come across this type of behaviour before or know if Nokia's slipping in some network support for the next firmware update?

Anyway.. I'm off to see if I can duplicate this and any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance

Ok, managed to reproduce the result.
WinXP machine didn't show up this time and it didn't show any files etc. within my Ubuntu Server for some reason, but at least it's progress

Screen 1 with the file manager from within the program..



Screen 2 through the file manager directly..



It only seems to work while the programs running, either on screen or minimized to the taskbar.

I see shared directories over my network all of the time on my n810. Is this something you aren't used to?

Yeh.. this is the first time that any have shown up??

This is what I usually see..



You got any specific networking software installed or has it always done it?

Its always done it. I got it early January and have done an upgrade from -49 to -52. But it did it out of the box. I was playing mp3s from my wife's laptop the first 10 minutes I turned it on.

OS2007 needed an add-on to access shared network folders, OS2008 doesn't. Unfortunately there are some problems with OS2008:
- it can't access password-protected folders, since there's no way to specificy user ID or password
- shared folders sometimes fail to appear in the File Manager, reboot needed
- it's difficult to get shared folder listings to refresh
- some tablet apps seem to have trouble accessing files from network folders directly (e.g., GPE Contacts can't import vcf files from a network folder with OS2008, but could with OS2007, and can if the file is copied to local storage)

My experience is that Shared Folder support is spotty at best. Sometimes they show up, other times nothing. I've noticed that it's most likely to work if you haven't made a phone connection yet. If you have, rebooting the device and connecting to your WiFi network first may help. Hopefully this will be fixed with the next OS update.

this is the one thing that pisses me off. Why on earth would they make connecting to windows share so hard?

Cheers for the help so far all. Think I might have sussed out the problem..

I noticed that my N800 could only see the network shares when my WinXP games machine was on; not only that, but it could only see the shares that the games machine could see.

I looks like the games machine is acting as a temporary WINS server when I click on browse networks in Windows networking and the N800 is getting the network shares directly from there.

Getting stable networking SHOULD be as easy as setting eiither my Linux server or one of the other computers on my network as a full WINS server.

Any body else done this on their own network yet, and has it worked?

Personally I think the ability to browse, open file and play media off the SMB shared is one of the coolest thing in the history of the Internet Tablet. Even though it's not perfect.
I think there maybe a work around on this. I don't exactly have time to work on this, and lacking a good knowledge on this part, but instead of focusing on the n8x0(which is the real problem) to look on protected smb share. I think if we can find out what username/password(blank?) the n8x0 is using in order to try to access the network, maybe we can add temporary username in the share object, instead of opening it to everyone, and possibly less security risk, until somebody find a way to hack the file manager or the next n8x0 update.