Can I plug a Ubuntu Laptop into a Ubuntu Laptop?
I have this special orange ethernet cable I bought a few years ago that's supposed to have reversed wires to allow two computers to be hooked together.
I have 3 internal drives and one external USB HDD attached to my main Laptop but the picture I'm looking for might be on the older laptop. Can I plug it into the USB hub and access files off it's 1 TB HDD?
The master laptop has Ubuntu 14.04 on one drive and Ubuntu 16.04 on another drive. The slave laptop has Ubuntu 14.04 (and Windows Vista 64-bit but I won't say that).
What do I need to do to make a mini-network as it were with the resources at hand? Of course they both have wifi too. The simplest answer would be appreciated because I'm IP challenged and can barely spell SSID.
This is not a duplicate of "sharing a folder over a network". What I want to do is plug a laptop into mine and control the HDD as if it were /dev/sdd or /dev/sde.
Yes you can
The orange Ethernet cable is a crossover cable. The purpose is to create an Internet of just two computers. Assuming the two laptops have Ethernet ports, you can do that.
Note: You don't need a special crossover cable with any recently built computers. Any standard Ethernet cable will do. The Ethernet sockets are now smart enough to connect two computers directly with a regular Ethernet cable.
Since the two laptops are not setup to dynamically assign IP addresses to the other, (something normally done by routers) you will have to setup static IP addresses for both. You can do this in the Network Manager.
Once you got the local networking figured out, you can use various ways to access either specific folders, or mount partitions.
- To mount a partition (or partitions) see Network File System and Setting up NFS: How to.
- To share a folder within your home folder, see the Ubuntu to Ubuntu part of this answer.
Hope this helps