Viewing a Windows network file share on Ubuntu is easy enough. In the Places menu, click Network, then Windows Network, then the computer you want to look in, and so on and so forth.
Only programs that use GNOME’s virtual file system framework (gnome-vfs) will be able to directly open files over the network like this – Gedit, Totem Movie Player, Evince (PDF viewer) etc (incidentally, gnome-vfs does more than samba; you can also treat things like remote FTP and SFTP/SCP folders this way). Things like VLC, Firefox etc can only see files on the local filesystem, so network shares have to be mounted locally for them. This is done using smbfs
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