Simple File Sharing in Linux - revisited

Meiga, the lightweight and easy to use content sharing software appeared in Fedora updates (Fedora 11 and 12) as of November 30, 2009. Thanks to Enrique, maintainer of Meiga and  Thomas, who reviewed and approved Meiga for Fedora. So, now onwards just use the package manager to install Meiga on Fedora.

Furthermore, Enrique requested to send a patch for adding the SPEC file to the source, so that any user who obtain the source can also easily build the RPMs. The result is here, and another patch to modify the build script to include this feature is here. I have also created the DEB package for Ubuntu 9.10, which is yet to appear in the Meiga website.

Now, in my previous post detailing the necessity which resulted in the discovery and packaging of Meiga, I have mentioned that I couldn’t find a very easy Linux-to-Linux file sharing tool (as easy as you can do in Windows, using Samba). Enter Dolphin.

Since KDE 4.3, I’ve been ~exclusively using KDE as the primary desktop environment, and it is awesome. While wandering through the unknown and unexplored realms of the default file manager in KDE, I came across a handful of very useful features.

1. Split View : Within the single window (rather, single tab) – two views of folders are possible. This is very handy when I want to compare and/or copy files from one folder to other.
   

   Dolphin's Split View feature

2. In-Shell access : Press “F4″ from any folder, another view with the terminal will open – now run your favourite rsync command from there and synchronize your personal files.
   

   Dolphin's In-Shell feature

3. Fish : Fish is the protocol to transfer files over SSH (or RSH). KDE/Dolphin implements and integrates the Fish protocol, which makes to share and/or copy files over the network damn easy. So, whenever you have two Linux boxes, start sshd (the OpenSSH daemon) on the system where files are to be shared, and just point to “fish://<ip_address_of_host>/” in the location bar of Dolphin. Dolphin will then ask the username/password for the host machine, and once logged in, browse all the files/folders the user has access to.
   

   Fish asking for authentication

   

   Dolphin copying files over Fish

GNOME/Nautilus users can use the “sftp://” protocol for the same effect.