3 Easy Ways to Connect to Windows Shared Folders from Linux

Connecting to file servers is something most people do on a daily basis even without thinking about it. In Linux, it may not be intuitive how to quickly connect to a samba or ftp server without a separate program. Here are a few different ways to connect to a remote file server without needing to touch a terminal.

Using Keyboard Shortcut
You can connect to a sever by opening the run application window with the Alt+F2 keyboard shortcut. You will just need to specify the server type by adding the protocol at the beginning of the command. For example [url=smb://][/url] will connect to a samba share; other supported protocols are ssh, ftp, sftp, http, and https.
Note: In the example below my server name is playground and the shared folder is called music.