Documentation/Maemo PC Connectivity Tutorial/Automatic Service Publishing

Maemo PC Connectivity automatically announces Samba shares, NFS shares, SSH, X11VNC and SBRSH through Avahi. Due to this, host PCs can easily find the services available from a Maemo device. Avahi is an open-source implementation of the ZeroConf. It is used to facilitate the discovery of services on a local network. It allows a Maemo device to publish and discover services and hosts running on a local network with no specific configuration. For example, you can plug in a Maemo device to a network and a Linux or Mac OS X host PC instantly finds disk shares and other network services running on your Maemo device.

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Avahi has not yet been included in Host PC Connectivity for Windows and thus automatic Maemo device service publishing does not work with Windows host PCs.

[edit] Using Avahi on Linux

First, you should install avahi-discover by executing the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install avahi-discover

Next, you can use the avahi-discover utility to see all services announced by the Maemo device, figure 7.1.

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Figure 7.1: Linux Avahi Discovery dialog

[edit] Using Avahi on Mac OS X

Samba and NFS shares from a Maemo device are automatically shown in the SHARED section of the Finder application, figure 7.2.

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Figure 7.2: Mac OS X Finder application