[Thunar-dev] Fuse, scripts and thunar

[Erlend Davidson]

Erik Harrison wrote:
> On 8/30/07, Erlend Davidson <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>   
>> Erlend Davidson wrote:
>>     
>>> fusesmb is a nice simple example since it requires no configuration. If
>>> the fusesmb binary is found in the path a device icon could appear with
>>> "Windows Shares" written on it, so that when the user clicks it a script
>>> is run which executes fusesmb (like my script before) and then thunar
>>> navigates to that directory.
>>>
>>> These scripts could either be distributed with thunar (enable/disabled
>>> by the user) or via a project in the same way as thunar-thumbnailers.
>>>
>>> Maybe it would be better to stick it in the xfce-places panel plugin as
>>> a test, just to see how it works?
>>>       
>> I'm currently writing a mock-up of this in the panel places menu.  It
>> isn't particularly difficult to do, although it does feel a little like
>> a hack.  Officially should this be handled by thunar-vfs, and a new
>> |THUNAR_VFS_VOLUME_KIND_SAMBA be made to handle it just like the other
>> volumes?
>>     
>
> I'm not sure entirely, but Benny has talked about adding network share
> browsing - adding mounting isn't hard, it's the browsing that most
> users miss. I'm fairly certain that Benny would like this to be at
> least theoretically cross OS and cross FS.
>   
I've used the share browsing on the major desktop environments, and the 
best (reliability) was xffm. Nautilus seems to have a reliability (and 
speed) problem where it suddenly cannot see a particular share. KDE was 
more reliable but goodness knows what it was doing.

The best current method, which allows for full network transparency and 
browsing of all shares across the network is "fusesmb". You run,
fusesmb -o allow_other /mnt/samba
and then you can see the whole samba shares structure and files under 
/mnt/samba. It also seems to be very fast.

Another nice thing about fusesmb is that it is cross desktop... I can 
mount the shares-structure (I say share-structure because this is not 
the same as mounting just one share... fusesmb provides access to the 
whole network and all workgroups), look at the folders there in thunar, 
open a few files in my default programs, all thumbnails will be 
generated as usual and video/music will work without any special support 
in the application.
> I infer by Benny's silence of late that he is on an Xfce break. We'll
> have to wait till he returns to see the details.
Well he does still respond to bugs and commit to the thunar svn:
http://svn.xfce.org/log.php?repname=xfce4&path=%2Fthunar%2Ftrunk%2F&rev=0&sc=0&isdir=1