[Thunar-dev] Network access in thunar?

[David Tenser]

On 8/5/06, Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer at unix-ag.uni-siegen.de> wrote:
> Stephan Arts wrote:
> >>Will Thunar eventually support network access such as accessing your
> >>Samba shares? In Gnome, it's possible to connect to the network using
> >>e.g. smb://mycomputer or ssh://me@server. Currently, for these use
> >>cases I have to start Nautilus (and make sure I don't just start
> >>"nautilus", or my desktop will be overtaken by it!).
> >
> > It would be interesting to see this kind of functionality. It has been
> > discussed before, thunar won't support it by default (IIRC), but
> > eventually it will be possible to write plugins for these things.
>
> Well, I have a patch to add samba support based on libsmbclient, but it
> doesn't work properly right now (esp. auth handling with libsmbclient is
> a mess). I have received several feature requests for samba support, so
> I guess that's atleast important enough to think about this again.
>
> Maybe I'll commit that for RC1, but disabled by default. Dunno yet.

Of course, even if Thunar eventually gets samba (omitting ssh)
support, it's not very useful unless other applications, such as the
media player, can handle the URIs. In Windows, a "samba" share is like
any other folder to the applications, because the support is
implemented in the system-level. In other words, it doesn't matter to
mplayer2.exe if I double-clicked on "C:\file.avi" or
"\\share\file.avi". To the application, both paths point to a file.

This kind of transparent network support is what I'm really asking
for, but maybe it's not suitable in this Thunar-specific mailing list.
Gnome seems (?) to have started to implement this, but it looks like
they implemented it in the application-level (e.g. totem has support
for smb://.. URIs while rhytmbox doesn't).

I have all my media (music, movies, etc) stored on my server which I
can access with samba or ssh. If I want to access these files, I need
to use e.g. Totem instead of Xfce's media player since the latter has
no support for network shares.

-- 
David Tenser