You can share a folder on an Ubuntu Linux system with Windows systems using Server Message Block (SMB) by installing Samba, a free and open-source software package. If Samba isn't installed, you can install it as a Debian package with the following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install samba
You can verify that the Samba service is running with the command
sudo systemctl status smbd; you should see "active (running)".
alice@Wonderland:~$ sudo systemctl status smbd ● smbd.service - Samba SMB Daemon Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/smbd.service; enabled; preset: ena> Active: active (running) since Sat 2026-09-12 17:09:53 EDT; 4min 16s ago Invocation: 4c72abe09deb445d91cb063be76afc0b Docs: man:smbd(8) man:samba(7) man:smb.conf(5) Main PID: 540371 (smbd) Status: "smbd: ready to serve connections..." Tasks: 3 (limit: 151234) Memory: 10M (peak: 11.1M) CPU: 161ms CGroup: /system.slice/smbd.service ├─540371 /usr/sbin/smbd --foreground --no-process-group ├─540388 "smbd: notifyd" . └─540389 "smbd: cleanupd " Sep 12 17:09:52 Wonderland systemd[1]: Starting smbd.service - Samba SMB Daemon... Sep 12 17:09:53 Wonderland update-apparmor-samba-profile[540361]: grep: /etc/appa> Sep 12 17:09:53 Wonderland update-apparmor-samba-profile[540367]: diff: /etc/appa> Sep 12 17:09:53 Wonderland systemd[1]: Started smbd.service - Samba SMB Daemon. alice@Wonderland:~$
Once Samba is installed, you will need to edit the Samba configuration file, smb.conf, to define the shared folder.
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