I can open a samba shared drive directly in Dolphin by simply typing smb://… If I then select “Add to places”, the drive will be in the left menu bar of Dolphin. No problems.
However, when trying to save an attachment in Thunderbird or downloading something on Firefox, I cannot access the shared drive. It is not featured in the download dialogue. I assume this would be the case for any application that tries to save something.
How can I access the shared drive in those dialogues?
The network location is probably mounted to somewhere in /run
or it needs to be mounted
so that you can access it via a regular PATH rather than using the network directly.
Don’t know how to say it better.
Can you not right click on the drive that is shown in the menu bar to get it’s properties, it’s location?
You likely need to create a stable network location via Dolphin – goto Remote → Network (in the Dolphin side panel) – enter the smb:// address into the input next to Add Network Folder and then choose Add Network Folder, and follow the prompts.
This will create a defined pathway to the network location which should be accessible by whichever players require it.
In KDE, certain packages will need to be installed for this to work as expected. They include; kio-fuse, smb4k, cifs-utils and possibly others.
There should always be a way in the dialog window to navigate to the parent directory, and thus also to the root directory, from which you can then navigate to the mountpoint.
If you find it too cumbersome to do this every time, then find the mountpoint beforehand and create a symbolic link to it in your home directory. That way you only need to click the symbolic link as if it is a local directory.