I have installed Ubuntu on VMware on a Mac Mini and want to access folders on the Ubuntu machine, firstly locally and then from the web but do not have a clue where to begin.
I can log into Ubuntu locally via Jollyfast over the LAN but cannot see or access folders on Ubuntu which I can with a Windows server running on same VM.
Any advice as to how to do this would be most appreciated.
You need to make it so that your OS X clients can see the Ubuntu server and so that OS X clients are presented with a network share that it is able to mount. You say that you're using "VMware", which isn't a product, but rather a company with a whole portfolio of products. Since you don't provide detailed information, the best that I can offer is some general advice.
Your "server" is probably behind a NAT boundary, due to the configuration of whatever VMWare desktop virtualization product that you are using. Set it to bridged mode so that clients on your LAN can access it as if it were any other node on the network.
Use SAMBA or netatalk to share the directory as either SMB/CIFS or an AFP volume. Then your OS X clients should be able to connect to it. I recommend the SMB/CIFS approach so that Windows clients can also access it (plus netatalk has its uses, but it's not nearly as widely used).
If you want to be able to have the Ubuntu server listed in the "Remote Computers" (or whatever it's called nowadays) section of Finder, you'll need to enable ZeroConfig (Bonjour/mDNS) on the server. Here is an outdated guide on how to do it. It doesn't list instructions for modern Ubuntu releases, but it should point you in the right direction.
