thanks thomas.

i tried this, i followed all the nfs advice and guidelines i could find on the internet and was (finally!) able to get an exported folder on the client.

however the main snag i hit was that the folder was read only, even though i used all the rw options and tricks i could find.

i think it was down to the exports file entries and having to remove old ones using exportfs -u however i looked down another route in the end.

in the end i hit on a way to do this, i simply accessed my samba shares (these shares are from a liunx box and designed to be accessed by windows clients) by doing smb://host_name from konqueror and then seeing the folders i needed access to, then entering a line in my /etc/fstab file like this...

//host_name/share_name /mount/point smbfs user,auto 0 0

and now i can add a device to the desktop and access the shares like i wanted to.

i know there are going to be nfs experts and purists out there going "oh my god, he did what?" and i have read how samba is only for windows etc, however i only need it for my lan, security isn't an issue, its a very simple network model and it works and nfs isn't without its issues either from what i can gather on the net.

also time is a premium to me.

the main reason i never used this solution before and tried getting my head around nfs in the first place is because if you only do the first part (smb://host_name from konqueror) then when you access a file in the share it downloads it first to a tmp folder before playing, in the case of a video that can take some time, however once i added the line in fstab and made the device then i could access the share like a normal windows share and the file is played from the share rather than a tmp folder.

i guess this is down to it being mounted.

anyway, thanks for the help, onwards and upwards.

steve.