Re: Lightweight samba GUI? (packages or otherwise)

[Andrew Reilly <andrew-netbsd%areilly.bpc-users.org@localhost>]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:42:23 -0500 (EST)
yancm%sdf.lonestar.org@localhost wrote:
> I need a GUI network file browser that can cooperate with several
> WinXP boxes. I know that samba does the heavy lifting, but what
> about a GUI? I searched the mail lists and guides, but did not
> find anything promising. I also looked on samba.org and looked
> for the GUIs they mentioned in pkgsrc, but came up empty...

I'd say that it depends on what level of cooperation you want.
If you want the GUI to be able to browse windows file-shares and
"mount" them when asked, then the only one that I've come across
that works (for small values of "work") is Nautilus in GNOME2.
This is not regularly regarded as being "light-weight"...

This is mostly because GNOME2 has the GNOME-VFS infrastructure
for doing user-space "file-system" proxy-ing for things like SMB
and FTP and other user-oriented protocols.  [KDE+Konquerer can
probably do the same, but I like GNOME, so I don't have the
relevant experience.]

The light-weight alternative is to use the system mount_smbfs
(not samba, which is a file *server*) to mount Windows file
shares into your real, file system hierarchy, and then use your
lightweight file system GUI to just browse as though they were
local.  The catch is that only super-users can do this, and you
have to pick a user and permissions at the time of mounting.  It
can be automated and made mostly-transparent with amd (automount
daemon), but that's quite hairy to configure, and I don't know
whether the official documentation shows how to mount smbfs
systems, rather than NFS (which is what it was originally
designed for).  The information is available in the mailing lists,
though.  When I was doing this sort of thing, and going for
light-weight, I really liked the ROX file browser and desktop.
Still do, but that's at least partly because I had an Acorn
Archimedes many years ago, and that's what ROX is patterned on.

That's a lot of ifs and buts, but I hope that it also has enough
leads and searchable key-words to be useful.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew