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I see a pop up that says

Share Files over the Network

This feature cannot be enabled because the required packages are not installed on your system

Simple enough, but what packages do I need?

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  • I have samba installed and am still getting the message above
    – user263177
    Mar 29, 2014 at 4:58

2 Answers 2

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what worked for me was install Apache2. Just install a LAMP server (or just apache) --

sudo apt-get install apache2

Then it should work just fine.

In 16.04 the change is from

enter image description here

to

enter image description here

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  • 2
    He is not trying to share it via HTTP. He is trying to share it like in windows. In this case the answer by jrg is the correct one.
    – Luis Alvarado
    Oct 24, 2011 at 0:56
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    Apparently apache2 is required for the Ubuntu's file sharing feature to work.
    – brianpeiris
    Sep 22, 2013 at 3:45
  • Using 16.04 here. I have first installed samba (and dependencies using synaptic) to no effect. I then apache2, again delegating to synaptic; it then activated the network activities. I have edited the post above to display the change in the Personal File Sharing Preference dialogue window (pending moderator's approval)
    – XavierStuvw
    Oct 26, 2019 at 11:48
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When you share files over the network in Ubuntu, you use samba - so you'll need to run sudo apt-get install samba and then try sharing the folder again.

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  • Not necessarily...I'd suggest NFS for a pure Linux environment. Though, AFAIK Samba is default choice of Ubuntu.
    – Bobby
    Feb 1, 2011 at 21:41
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    Personally I would also install smbfs and system-config-samba packages the first makes it possible to create permanent mounts through fstab and the last is an admin config app for your own shares which will make it easier to setup and modify your own shares plus my own shares wouldn't show up on a vista machine until I had shared them using the Samba config.
    – Allan
    Feb 2, 2011 at 12:09
  • @Allan True. @Bobby Yeah. Samba isn't necessarily the best way to do this, but it's the default choice.
    – jrg
    Feb 2, 2011 at 12:16

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