Re: file access using smb://

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 12:36 +0100, Iain Mac Donald wrote:

> In contrast to this I find that using smb://, EOG & GIMP won't open
> images, Gnumeric will open files but will only save to existing
> filenames, Abiword will not open files, GPDF will not open files, GEDIT
> will only open files in read only mode etc. Obviously, files can be
> dragged to the Desktop, edited and then placed back again but this isn't
> consistent with local files.

It depends a lot on how apps use GtkFileChooser and gnome-vfs.

GtkFileChooser uses gnome-vfs internally if libgnomeui is installed.
However, apps must explicitly tell the file chooser that they want to
access non-local files.  This is because although the file chooser may
be using gnome-vfs internally, the calling app may just use fopen() or
the standard Unix I/O API:  in that case, the app will only want local
files to appear in the file chooser.

Gedit only supports read-only operation for remote files.  I believe
this is getting fixed in the development branch.

EOG should work fine, but see the caveat below.

It's very likely that the GIMP won't work, because it doesn't use
gnome-vfs.

I'm not sure about Gnumeric, Abiword, or Gpdf.

Currently the file chooser has an important bug with respect to SMB:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136271

If you tell it to go to "smb://servername/folder" directly it will let
you browse and select files just fine, but it won't work if you just
tell it to find all shares through "smb:///".  I'm working on that bug
right now (see the mail I sent to this list yesterday).

  Federico