Alexander Larsson has been hacking like a whirlwind, bringing us the next generation in VFS services for the desktop, GVFS. By now, a lot of the planned functionality is done, and we even have a partially done FUSE frontend which will let legacy apps that can’t or won’t link with GVFS access the user’s mounts under ~/.vfs/.
Alex’ master repository does not have the FUSE module yet, so you can get it from my repository in the meantime.
Unfortunately, the SMB backend is pretty flaky, frequently locking up when reading directory information or file data from remote shares. So if you’re a debugging hotshot and you want to help bring desktop file browsing to the next level, here’s your chance!
GVFS is pretty easy to set up and test:
- Clone, build, install to $prefix.
- Make sure you have a working D-Bus setup.
- Make sure you have the FUSE kernel module installed.
- mkdir ~/.vfs
- $prefix/libexec/gvfs-daemon
- $prefix/libexec/gvfs-fuse-daemon -f ~/.vfs
- $prefix/bin/gvfs-mount smb://server/share
The new mount should show up under ~/.vfs/, and you can explore it from there.