Pierre Massat wrote:
> I did some research on the web and found that some people use samba for the
> same purpose (reach a computer in the local network by its hostname).
> What are the differences between avahi and samba ?
Zeroconf/avahi is meant for standadized automatic discovery/announce of
ressources on a network.
Samba (Windows shared folders) is meant for shared folders. It happens
to announce the names too. This is because when SMB arrived (long ago),
there was no such things as Zeroconf.
> Do they both require a client on the other end ?
To make it short, you can see avahi as a general purpose version of the
samba name announcer.
The client can be firefox, ftp, ping, pd, whatever service you use.