The eee now spends most of its time being used as a convenient way to play music through the stereo. This means it needs to mount the shared directory on the server downstairs that contains all the music. This caused a few problems initially because Amarok doesn’t seem to like Samba shares and it just wouldn’t build the collection even though I could access the tracks by simply browsing the file system. It took me some expert help and a few goes to get the syntax of the mount command right, and what I ended up with was rather a mouthful:

sudo mount -t cifs //silver/music /home/user/silvermusic -o username=samba_username,password=samba_password,iocharset=utf8,
file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777

Thank goodness you can use the up-arrow to recall terminal commands! But it does work, and Amarok can build the collection correctly. Helpful Mike S explained to me how to set up fstab to load it automatically:

The following line would do it:

//silver/music /home/user/silvermusic cifs username=samba_username,password=samba_password,iocharset=utf8,
file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

But it would be better to not put the login details in fstab, so you should create a credentials file to hold the username and password:
sudo nano /root/.sambacred

Then add the following to it:

username=samba_username
password=samba_password

Then make it read/writeable only by root in order to keep other people out of it:
sudo chmod 600 /root/.sambacred

Then use the following line in fstab:

//silver/music /home/user/silvermusic cifs credentials=root/.sambacred,iocharset=utf8,
file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Note: I have introduced line breaks for formatting here, but it’s very important to avoid extraneous spaces in these lines :-) After cifs there should be no spaces. Unfortunately in my case it doesn’t work, I think because the wireless interface doesn’t come up until after fstab has been read, in fact it isn’t activated until after the GUI has loaded. So I ended up just putting the original unwieldy line in a shell script called loadmusic.sh so I can easily run it from the shell prompt. I imagine Mike’s way would work if I was using a wired connection.