I have used different desktop environments over the years and find different strengths and weaknesses to each. I haven’t used Xfce in years (bounce between KDE, Gnome, Mate and Unity)
I am considering switching my openSUSE Tumbleweed laptop from its current Gnome to Xfce environments and have a couple of questions before I take the plunge. Like I said, I haven’t used it in years and don’t know its current state.
Most notably with Xfce was that the Thunar File Manager was not as good as Nautilus when it came to connecting to a remote server.
What I am looking for is whether Thunar can connect to a remote server on the LAN or WAN, sometimes by IP address, over SFTP/SSH. Even better is if it can bookmark the connection and remember my credentials.
By doing this I want to be able to open a file remotely (let’s say a PHP file from a web server), edit it locally (let’s say in gEdit) and save it back to the remote server.
So my question is, can Xfce’s Thunar file manager have these capabilities (connect over SSH/SFTP, conenct with IP address, bookmark connection, remember credentials)?
If not, in the past I have tried using Nautilus in Xfce but it would mess with the desktop/background display and windows display. I seem to remember could run nautilus with
nautilus --no-desktop
but I don’t know if that is still available and whether it works or if Nautilus just messes things up in Xfce regardless.
If anybody has any insight about Thunar, or Nautilus or have some other solution I may not have thought of before please let me know!
3 of the servers are in-house, one web server and two Minecraft servers.
2 are external work web servers running FreeBSD without any desktop environments.
I guess the other piece I didn’t mention was being able to copy files up/down between my local system and the server (an image, or modpack for instance). I don’t want to bother with configuring Samba and in the case of the work servers, am not allowed to add Samba.
Installing Xfce and Thunar actually kept my bookmarks from Nautilus (must be in my /home directory because that doesn’t get wiped out each install).
So I was able to get to the LAN-based network drive, after I remember adding Samba Client to the Firewall “allow” list.
I tried to get to the non-Samba compatible server
sftp://<username>@10.0.0.x
but it never enabled the OK button so I presume it did not like the address structure.
But then it froze on me completely, then didn’t start X when I rebooted and did start X when I rebooted again but died showing the plymouth background (before he login credentials). That’s all for another thread or another install, but the bottom line was I didn’t get a chance to try an external server or to spend more time trying to get to the 10.0.0.x server but I did get to the server I could find by browsing the network.
I have SSH’d to it previously and don’t remember having to do anything with the firewall on the client.
I didn’t get the chance to test SSH-ing into the server before the system started giving me trouble so that may be something to do when I get that going again, just to verify.
Ahhhhh… finally seem to have gotten all of the “gotchas” ironed out (gstreamer, rpm db, etc.) and tried accessing the server using sftp://
It worked! Woo hoo!
At first it wasn’t working, but then I realized I was trying smb:// in the address instead of sftp://, and samba isn’t installed on the server.
I’ll have to do “<username>@<ip address>” so far, but that’s fine. I can still have it save my password forever or until I log out, which works fine. Don’t know if that will cause a problem when I try logging into the same server with a different name, or not, but it didn’t seem to bat an eyelash when I switched it this morning.
So in answer to my original question seems to be “Yes, it can connect from Thunar to a remote server using SFTP”