I have an ethernet cable (not a crossover cable) to connect my laptop and my desktop ubuntu machines. I want to transfer large amounts of data. Is it possible with such a cable? I believe that between two Windows machines such a connection is possible (though I'm not totally sure).
Of course you can! Connect them with the cable, set IP addresses for each machine, for example 192.168.1.1 for your desktop and 192.168.1.2 for your notebook. Don't forget to disable/enable the connection after you set the addresses, as it may be necessary for them to become active.
Then, on one of your machines, possibly the source of the data, right click the folder you want to share, go to "Share" and enable sharing. Samba is required for this and you will be asked whether you want to install it when enabling sharing, otherwise, if it's already installed, it will just work right away. Remember to set an easy sharing name, something short and without spaces.
Now, go to the other machine, open nautilus (or any other file manager thereof) and go to location:
smb://192.168.1.2/folder/
Where:
192.168.1.2 is the IP of the source machine where the folder is being shared.
folder is the folder name you set when enabling the sharing.
In nautilus, you can go to this location by clicking CTRL + L and writing it to the address bar.
