Thanks for this. I was able to get it going without installing samba, thus avoiding the overhead of being a server, since all I want to do is access shares on other servers.
Basically skip step 1, do all the other steps.
Skipping step 1 avoids all the server stuff but you'll have to do one or two other things before you're done:
Manually edit ~/.smb/fusesmb.conf to add your windows browsing credentials:
Code:
[global]
username=YourSMBUsername
password=YourSMBPassword
Do a "man fusesmb.conf" to learn what other options you can put here, but this is all you absolutely need.
Additionally I had to "chgrp fuse /dev/fusesmb", which should have happened automatically when fuse was installed but didn't.
To make life easier I added a launcher to the panel to run "thunar /media/network/" and gave it the file management icon.
That's it; all the browsing convenience and none of the being-a-server overhead. Thanks again for the great howto.