Network Browsing via GUI

[SamK]

This post didn't generate much of a response,
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=1116.0
so here goes again as a slight variation.

Is there a GUI network browser in the TC3.1 repo that enables the mounting of shares?  Preferably one that isn't linked to a particular desktop suite or browser.

How do other users do this currently.  Does anyone have a favourite way which they use, that is not available in the repo?  Has anyone made an extension for private use and is successfully using it?

I'm not asking them to publish and maintain their preferred app - just mention it and perhaps indicate why they like it.
 

[beerstein]

Hello: I looking at a similar solution. I learned that mc (midnight commander)
can mount partitions on a networked ps (ftp or http?)
I have no clou how to do it but would like to learn how?

Thank you

[andrewb]

I guess this is what you're looking for. I don't think it has been made into an extension yet:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/linneighborhood/

[beerstein]

Hi: Thank you for the tip. Can we use an extension from another distri?
Which, by the way is the closest to tiny core - debian? the old DSL Linux? or Knoppix?

have a good day

[SamK]

I guess this is what you're looking for. I don't think it has been made into an extension yet:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/linneighborhood/

Hi, thanks for the suggestion.

Having previously looked at both linneighborhood, and pyNeighborhood, both do indeed allow browsing the network howerver, neither of them now seem able to mount samba shares.  I know it was possible as I have used both of them in the past for this. 

This inability to mount shares was partly the reason for starting the thread.

The best candidate I have found at the moment is gigolo:
http://www.uvena.de/gigolo/index.html
This works reliably and well on the systems I have tested it on.  From the home page:

Gigolo is a frontend to easily manage connections to local and remote filesystems using GIO/GVfs... It allows you to quickly connect/mount a remote filesystem... It is part of the Xfce Goodies project... though it does not have any hard Xfce dependencies and can be used on other desktop environments as well. The only hard dependency is GTK2 (2.12 or newer).

From my non-coders perspective, it seems that TC may already have some of the elements gigolo requires.  If this is the case perhaps one of the experienced TC packagers might find it interesting also.
 

[Rich]

I've looked at a lot of these packages and one of the problems I have is that they pull in a lot of
baggage with them. The way I see it is that there are two things required:

1. Some way to get a list of available shares. Armed with that the mount command can be used.
2. A GUI to list and mount/unmount the shares.

You can use smbtree from the Samba package for the list, it weighs in at a mere 3.7Mb, don't forget
to include it's dependency libwbclient.so.0, another 40Kb. I decided to write my own version of
smbtree. It's < 28Kb unstripped, < 12Kb stripped, and has no dependencies. It's output looks like:

Code: [Select]

tc@box:~/findshares/src$ time ./findshares
findshares version 0.90 April 23,2011
Copyright Richard A. Rost April 23,2011

I am box

SLUSH-O-MATIC 
         RICHMAIN        192.168.1.43  1st Floor
                NETGEAR         
                NETWORKTOOLS     
                IPC$             Remote Inter Process Communication

WORKGROUP     
         GERRYLAPTOP     192.168.1.45  Gerry's Laptop
                My Documents     
                IPC$             Remote IPC
                ADMIN$           Remote Admin
                C$               Default share

MYGROUP       
         BITBUCKET       192.168.1.47  TC Samba Server
                public           Usable by all
                smalldrive       Temporary workspace
                IPC$             IPC Service (TC Samba Server)

real    0m 0.48s
user    0m 0.00s
sys     0m 0.00s
tc@box:~/findshares/src$

The proportional font used on the forum messed up the alignment a bit. It's compiled under TC3.4 but
I copied it to my file server running TC2.1 and it runs just fine there too. It's been tested against Win98,
Windows XP, and samba running on TC and Debian. I don't have wireless so I don't know how it will fair
with that. If anyone is interested in doing some testing let me know. If the results look promising I will
try my hand at a GUI.

[b1ackmai1er]

Maybe you could ask if this functionality can be added to fluff?

[tinypoodle]

Using sshfs-fuse it should be possible to access files over the network with any (GUI) file manager.

[Rich]

@tinypoodle: The info tab for sshfs-fuse seems to imply an ftp protocol, or am I missing something?

[tinypoodle]

Not exactly ftp, but a running sftp server is required to run on the boxes to be accessed.

See also
http://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php?topic=1738.0
and other threads which could be found by doing a search for "sshfs".

[Rich]

But this is about mounting Windows and Samba shares which use SMB protocol.

[tinypoodle]

The topic title is

Network Browsing via GUI

and Reply #6 asked about functionality to be added to fluff,
so I meant to point out an approach how fluff could be used to browse network.

Besides from that, the keywords "windows", "samba", "smb" have no presence anywhere else in this thread except from your Reply #5.
Other than that, approaches involving ftp, http, GIO/GVfs have been discussed in earlier posts.

[curaga]

Looking forward to seeing the source

[Rich]

The topic could have been named better. And yes, you are correct, except for my post, post #4, and
the subject of the link in post #1, Samba is never mentioned.

b1ackmai1er ask about fluff, not me.

[tinypoodle]

Got confused by getting a question from you upon my reply to b1ackmai1er.
Post in question corrected accordingly.