pcmanfm and local shares?

[roszyk]

Is pcmanfm capable of accessing local network shares. I installed mint 8 lxde ce on a dell b120 laptop and everything works fine except i cannot access any local shares. i have installed samba but i still cannot find any way to view my shared folders as i can on my mint 8 desktops using nautilus.

[richyrich]

Have you tried mounting them through pyNeighborhood ? (in the menu)

[roszyk]

Yes, I can see the other mint 8 systems in pyneighborhood, but in pcmanfm there is no way I can find to browse the network shares. I have since installed nautilus and it has no problem browsing the shared folders on my networked desktops. I guess pcmanfm does not allow this (at least by default). Thanks. Roszyk

[richyrich]

I've found that Gigolo (pre-installed in the Mint Xfce Editions - thanks merlwiz79 ), and seen as Remote File Systems in the menu, is an awesome little app that will find your local shares, and get you connected ! I use the View-> Sidepane, and let it scan, then just a click to connect (double-click to open in the file manager). . . I installed it in my Mint Fluxbox from the Package Manager, and it works like a charm there too !

Might be something worth looking into to see if it works with pcmanfm ?

richy

[GravityGilly]

I had a similar problem, though it was browsing shares on a network drive; after a bit of googling I found a solution involving using smbnetfs and mounting to my home directory like this:

First went to Preferences > Shared folders, made sure everything was set up properly there.

Then:

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sudo apt-get install smbnetfs
mkdir ~/.smb
cp -v /etc/samba/smb.conf ~/.smb/
cp -v /etc/smbnetfs.conf ~/.smb/
mkdir ~/network
smbnetfs ~/network

That lets me browse the shares on my network drive through the ~/network directory.

Then found I needed to add the following line to the autostart.sh file to get it to mount every time I boot:

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# Launch LAN connection at start up
(sleep 30s && smbnetfs ~/network) &

[/i]

Hope that helps. There's probably a better way of doing it, but this way worked (I forget where I got it from...as I said, just google). Not sure if it's 100% relevant, as you're trying to browse other Mint desktop shares, but could be worth a shot.

EDIT: Actually, no, that only works for the first boot; the autostart.sh part doesn't work. I just made a file on the desktop called "Network drive.sh" and put

Code: Select all

smbnetfs ~/network

in it. I double click on that, then open up pcmanfm and navigate to ~/network (you can set a bookmark there if you like, but still need to run smbnetfs ~/network before you go there). It's far from perfect, but I think smb support is planned in the next version of pcmanfm, which I think is in alpha so shouldn't be too far away.

[altair4]

GravityGilly, thank you very much for that post. That's very interesting.

I've been playing around with it and I've come up with this method to autostart at login. Keep in mind that I've used this DE for only a few days so if this is not the right way to go about this I will definitely not be insulted if you correct me.

I created a sambaclient.desktop file that looks like this:

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[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name= MyNetwork
Icon=network-workgroup
Comment=Samba Shares
Exec=lxterminal --command "smbnetfs /home/altair/network"
Terminal=true

Created an "autostart" folder: /home/altair/.config/autostart
Saved sambaclient.desktop to the autostart folder
Made it executable
Rebooted

I've rebooted a couple of times and it seems to work although I am in VirtualBox so I don't know if there would be any complications if I did this for "real"

[GravityGilly]

Trust me, you probably have a much better clue than I do altair; I'm not a particularly experienced Linux user, and Mint 8 was my first dabble into LXDE as well.

Anyway, I tried your .desktop-file-in-an-autostart folder idea, and I think it falls fowl of similar problems that the autostart.sh script did. I say this because when I unmount the shares using fusermount -u ~/network, then execute your .desktop file by clicking on it, I can access my network shares fine. However, when I reboot the computer, assuming the .desktop file has been executed as part of the autostart folder, I cannot access the shares (though interestingly, I can unmount them using the fusermount command).

I'm guessing the reason the script doesn't work "from cold" is that it runs before I can establish a network connection. However, I did try and compensate for this with the sleep part of the autostart.sh file I tried, but that didn't work either. I don't know what the real problem is, but as long as the next version of pcmanfm comes out fairly soon with smb support then I don't mind just double clicking an icon on my desktop before I want to browse my network drive, cumbersome as it may be for now.