Having joined many other geeks by becoming the happy owner of a N770 (or N800 if you got lots of free dosh) one of the questions that people have wanted to know is how to access their PC using the tablet. The solutions I’ve found cover using Samba/CIFS and hacking into the tablet’s OS and creating mount points. The problem with this in my mind is that creating mount points is a fair bit of fiddling around and specific to a single host.

There is definitely one simpler solution, albeit with a couple of limitations. As the basic browser can handle FTP, I’ve simply installed FileZilla (Server) and shared my PC’s root directory. As long as your network is safe you can share the without any passwords etc. It can be setup to quietly sit in the background as a service. If your root directory is too much you could just select which folders to make available. Then just point your opera browser to FTP://<yourIP> and Bob’s your Uncle as they say.

The only down side I’ve found is the handling of spaces in filenames. Filezilla escapes them with %20 – but when you try to access the file it can’t find it. There are several applications out there that can solve this problem (an example here). Filezilla looks good to me as it doesn’t seem to consume much in the way of resources. For other platforms you would need to get a different Server as FileZilla Server is windows only.

The other option that is open to Windows XP Pro and Windows Server users have that I’m looking at trying is setting up IIS which is free with these versions of Windows. However this approach does mean that you’ll also need to get Minimo (the Mozilla port for Maemo) as IIS tries to authenticate in a way that Opera is unable to support. Once you’ve got Minimo then you just need to configure IIS to share certain folders, and then Bob is still your Uncle.

del.icio.us tags: FileZilla, Maemo, N770, N800, FTP, Opera, Minimo, Mozilla