Network shares and printing

Graphical builds include GVfs and its SMB backend. The common libfm defaults enable Network and Devices in PCManFM’s Places sidebar; its default profile opens with that sidebar visible. LXDE keeps its separate LXDE profile. User preferences in ~/.config/libfm/libfm.conf and ~/.config/pcmanfm/ take precedence over these system defaults.

Openbox’s desktop menu offers Network Shares and Printers. The start menu offers Network Shares among favourites and Printers in Control Center. The application menu also includes a Network Shares launcher when PCManFM is installed. Printer configuration uses system-config-printer with PolicyKit.

The printing profile enables cupsd, D-Bus and Avahi. Selecting a desktop directly, without a preset, now includes this profile too.

Live-session verification

  1. Open PCManFM and select Network. Check discovery on the local LAN.

  2. Press Ctrl+L and enter smb://SERVER/SHARE (or use the server IP). Verify login, listing, opening and copying files both ways where permitted. This tests SMB independently of automatic discovery.

  3. Run sv status /var/service/avahi-daemon /var/service/cupsd.

  4. Open Printers, add a network printer and print a test page. IPP Everywhere discovery requires a reachable printer advertising over mDNS.

  5. Repeat in another PCManFM-based WM and an existing full desktop.

Automatic discovery depends on advertisements, routing and firewall rules. The desktop-essentials profile includes upstream wsdd 0.9 and its Python/XML dependencies. GVfs starts it on demand in discovery-only mode using a private Unix socket; it needs no additional autostart or runit service. The vendored source, licence, checksums and update instructions are in configs/custom_files/wsdd/README.md. Direct SMB URLs do not depend on WS-Discovery. SMB1 is kept disabled. These changes configure clients; they do not enable a Samba server or publish local folders/printers.

Automated checks cover build composition, configuration, menu commands and the wsdd socket API with the command-line options used by GVfs. They do not replace the live-session checks above.