Samba on Saluki

[can8v]

I have not been active in the community for a few years and haven't used Puppy much during that time. I have decided to come back to it recently and I have set up an old Dell laptop with Saluki for the purpose of ripping my DVD collection and serving the movies to all of the computers and devices in my household. Handbrake and Thoggen have been very powerful for that purpose and MiniDLNA has been great, but I have had no luck getting SAMBA up and running. MiniDLNA is great when you want to stream movies at home, but I need SAMBA so I can download M4V files to my Android devices, so we can take our media on the road. This wouldn't be such a critical feature if I could easily connect Android devices to the Saluki machine as a Mass Storage Device. When I try this I am completely unable to mount the devices.Android file transfer does seem to do anything either. I have been stuck with putting all of the movies on a NTFS partition and dual booting into Win 7 when I need to transfer files to my Android devices. In Win 7 I can easily connect my devices as Mass Storage or use ES File Explorer to connect to a Winblows network share.
What I am looking for is primarily a solution to transfer files from Saluki to the Android devices. I have tried installing the Samba Pet from the PPM, but despite the PPM reporting the everything installed correctly, the smb.conf file was missing, as was the Samba Simple Management Tool and even after creating a smb.conf file I cannot get Samba to start. I am looking for the least painful solution to get these files onto the Android devices without having to boot into Win7 to get the job done. Should I just use FTP? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[trapster]

Media House works well on my android to watch/listen/download music and videos from my linux server with minidlna.

[rcrsn51]

Look at Samba-TNG. It runs in Saluki and I have used it with Android clients. But I had to set the server in "no-login" mode. YMMV.

Samba-TNG uses different admin tools than other Samba packages, so you need to follow the documentation.

[can8v]

Media House works well on my android to watch/listen/download music and videos from my linux server with minidlna.

trapster, thanks for the tip. Since your post I have discovered that some of the better DLNA renderers available in the Google Play store have a download feature. This helped quite a bit, even if it was limited to file types supported by DLNA. Interesting enough I found that it is really only the Google Nexus products that have this issue. The other Android products in the house are not hindered by Google's annoying theory that everybody should be using their Cloud storage products to store everything. That theory no doubt is why they make it difficult to use their devices the way I want to. This is evidenced with the myriad of downloadable replacement ROMs designed specifically for Google Nexus products. At any rate thanks for your tip.