I have a fresh install of Mandriva 2012, and the issue with samba is that I cannot access the Windows network through Dolphin.

I have Samba shares set up on the system and they are accessible on the network, working/sharing completely normal. But when I try to browse the network with Dolphin, I get the "Unable to create io-slave: klauncher said: Error loading 'kio_smb'" error. I was doing some troubleshooting (I launched Dolphin from a terminal) and I discovered that Dolphin is looking for a file in "/tmp/kde-myusername", but the file it is looking for does not exist. For example, launching Dolphin from the terminal, it reports that it's looking for a file called "dolphinKx5691.slave-socket" but that file isn't in the directory... instead there is a file called "dolphinW12962.slave-socket". If I close then re-open Dolphin, it looks for a differently-named file, but no matter what file name it's looking for, the correct file is never in the tmp/kde-myusername directory. I've tried deleting the (incorrect) file from the directory, but the correct file is never generated.

Additionally, I decided to try launching Dolphin from the terminal as root, and the Windows network opens immediately in Dolphin and I can browse my Windows computers. IOW, accessing Windows network assets works normally when I use Dolphin as root, but not when I'm using Dolphin as my user account, which leads me to think it's some sort of a permissions issue, but since I'm not a samba guru I'm kinda lost at this point, so I'm hoping that one of you samba gurus can help me out.

And FWIW, the firewall is off (iptables -L reports clean chains) and I can ping all Windows computers from Mandriva. I also have tested the NIC, which works normally.

What say you?

A quick google did find your problem and it and it has been reported as a bug. dolphin has a samba client built in and as you say it works as root so it is an application / KDE problem and not samba per se. I did find a similar bug in the saboyon that solved it by updating pykde.

http://mandriva.598463.n5.nabble.com...td5710482.html

http://bugs.sabayon.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3212

Yes, I'm aware of the bug report, but I didn't post here to find out if this is a bug. I posted here in hopes of someone being helpful and offering a fix/work around/some sort of solution.

This seems like it may be a Mandriva specific problem. I'm moving your thread to the Mandriva forum were you are more likely to get a specific answer.

It may indeed be Mandriva specific, but I wish you hadn't moved the thread. I specifically posted in Networking in the hopes of catching a few more eyes - the Mandriva sub-forum here is pretty dead.