Linking to local files on a Windows file server share

Question

I tried to find a similar topic, but failed to do so. So I am asking the question here.

At our company I am running a pilot to get Ubuntu on our machines, as it would solve a lot of our problems.

However, I encountered what would be a major deal breaker for us.

We use an in-house developed backoffice / ERP system and work a lot with picture files which then are printed on a variety of products. The backoffice is web-based and accessed through Mozilla Firefox.

We sometimes have to check those picture files and there is a button in the backoffice that allows us to view the file with a link like: ///diskstation/production/pictures/filename.png

On Windows the file opens without problems, but the link does not work in Ubuntu (Firefox). If you click on it you get an error message saying that no such file exists.

If I navigate to the path manually, I can open the file on Ubuntu too.

It looks to me like the link "formula" to the local file is Windows-specific.

Is there a way we could link to the file so that it is universally accessible?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

It is not clear which is the method you are using to access the remote shares --- but yes, the path to a remote share is different in Linux and in Windows. The paths specification is different, really.

If you can navigate to your file, you can see what the path (URL) is. If you are accessing the file with your browser, the one that (should) work with a browser is available in the properties dialog of the file manager (right click on the object):

and it works for me:

The complete path to my file would be smb://pascua/ftp/red/vnc/tightvnc-1.2.9-setup.exe and if it where an image, feeding it to the browser will show it.

Additionally, the file from a remote server is visible somewhere in your directory hierarchy, and accessible as a normal file. To know how the file is known in the file system (as if it where a local file), drag the file icon in a terminal emulator window (here I typed ls -l before):

In this case the path is strange because the file is mounted by the gvfs backend (it's a user mount), in the case of system-mounted shares it should be easier to parse.