Developing apps for the Boxee Box can be a little difficult using the methods and means given to you currently by Boxee, but thanks to several different people out on the internet, myself included, a great website has been started (to which I am only a contributor) called Boxee Box Wiki. This website has a lot of great information about the operating system, the hardware, and more. This posting will give you some advice and information on how to create an SMB share to your apps folder for application development with write privileges.

First start off by reading http://boxeeboxwiki.org/wiki/Samba, which has information to enabling SMB on the Box. Essentially you need to enable SMB, then add a share to the location you wish to upload/download files from. By default the SMB service starts as root and then once you make a connection subsequent processes are spawned using the nobody user.

For example, I wanted an easier way to do application development so I added the /data/.boxee/UserData/apps folder as a share point. I then downloaded my latest app from my personal repository so that it would be loaded. At that point I changed the ownership of my apps folder recursively to user nobody, so that the smb process would have the ability to modify the files. To change ownership of a folder you will have to telnet into the box, telnet should already be enabled since you have enabled smb at this point.

Steps Overview
* Enable Telnet
* Enable Samba
* Modify /data/etc/smb.conf, add a new share stanza, then save the file
* Change ownership of the share folder using chown (chown -R nobody )
* Restart Samba (/etc/init.d/smbd restart)

Disclaimer: Please be aware that modifying permissions outside of the apps folder could prevent your box from working again correctly in the future. So tread carefully if you start changing permissions.