What's the easiest way to mount Windows share as a local folder in home directory?

Suppose you have a directory called mounts in your home directory in which you want various Samba shares to be mounted. Suppose further that you are specifically interested in mounting a share called sharename from a remote machine called hostname (this could also be an IP address), and on that remote machine your username is username. First, create the mount point:

mkdir ~/mounts/sharename

Then mount the share:

sudo mount.cifs //hostname/sharename ~/mounts/sharename -o user=username

In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and earlier, if you don't have the mount.cifs command, you can either install the cifs-utils package, or use smbmount instead (which is, in turn, provided by the smbfs package).

sudo smbmount //hostname/sharename ~/mounts/sharename -o user=username

(smbmount is not available in Ubuntu 12.10 or higher, at least so far, but you can use mount.cifs instead. Thanks to HDave for pointing this out.)

You may be prompted for your password on the local machine, to run the command as root. Then you'll be prompted for your password on the remote machine, to log in so you can mount the share.

• Open your file manager, i.e. click the icon for Home Folder
• Observe up at the top of the screen is the Menu for the File Manager (as opposed to at the top of its window);
• Click File → Connect to Server...; a window should open titled Connect to Server
• Click into its drop-down box titled Type; choose Windows share (i.e. change from the default of Public FTP)
• Enter the Server (the name if it can be resolved by DNS or its IP address
• Enter the Share (i.e the items you'd otherwise see in a windows share as the Share component of '\\Server\Share')
• Enter into Folder the name of any particular directory on the share that you'd like the mount to position at
• Enter any/optional User Details
• The Share should Mount and appear in the File Manager window on the left list under Network
• You might then like to create a bookmark for that mount. Again, from the File Manager menu at the top of the screen: Bookmarks → Add bookmark (after first clicking on/highlighting the share you have just mounted).

Not sure if you are still looking for something easy, I just found it:

All the shares you have opened are mounted automatically in your home folder under /home/.gvfs.

Any application can recognize and access the shares as if they were normal folders, as long as you point the application to the files or folders you want in /home/.gvfs