In this month’s KDE: From the Source, entitled Breaking the Network Barrier George Staikos takes us on a walk-through of KDE’s desktop networking protocol handlers in the vein of sftp:// webdav:// and a few really nifty ones I wasn’t aware of like info:/ perldoc:/ and tar:/.
KDE: Breaking the Network Barrier
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I knew about the ftp and http and file protoclls, but never imagined something as cool as audio or fish.
KDE did a great job there
Geri
fish://, combined with kate and a suitable server, is one of, if not the thing that convinced me that KDE is a better place to work than windows for the things I do. After adding a few shortcuts in the file dialog (which is extremely easy), I can edit remote files in a nice editor as easy as if they were local. Saving updates immideately, and with a browser pointed at the right place, the whole process is as practical and fast as working locally.
Besides, a split-view konqueror window with one pane local and one fish:// is a nice substitute for winSCP.
Wow I didn’t know about these features!
To all of you people that know about the KDE insides – post more news like this.
those are things I miss in GNOME. I should try KDE again, though I do appreciate gnome’s spartan interface.
So what’s the difference between fish:// and sftp://
GNOME has sftp:// ftp:// and many others, perhaps not as many as KDE. This is something they really polished up in 2.8.
the diff i guess is that in kde you can write a io kpart and it will work in every dialog and address entry in kde. how do you go about doing something like that in gnome?
as for the fish vs sftp stuff, sftp uses the ftp protocol with encryption slapped on top while fish uses pure ssh. atleast thats my guess
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those are things I miss in GNOME. I should try KDE again, though I do appreciate gnome’s spartan interface.
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You chould try a KDE-lite distro, like Xandros, it doesn’t use Konqueror’s UI but XFFM (based on Konqueror tho)
Gnome has virtual filesystems too. For example gzip, ssh, rpm, fonts deb, etc. are supported. You can even mount URIs ( http://primates.ximian.com/~sandino/gnomevfs-mount/ ).
Links which may interest you:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-gnvfs/?ca=dgr…
http://docs.linux.cz/programming/gnome/developer.gnome.org/doc/API/…
To get back to the topic: I really like those VFS features of Gnome and KDE. They make them both really superior DEs.
yes gnome has them, but not many applications support them fully. When will I be able to use gedit to edit files over ftp like you can with any kde applications? Gedit still is read-only for files over ftp, for example…
it would be fine with me if KDE.org made their own 100% KDE optimised Linux distro, i might even give it a spin, hopefully they would also include GTK and enough of Gnome’s underbelly to let Mozilla & a few other GTK dependant apps run too
> they would also include GTK and enough of Gnome’s underbelly to let Mozilla & a few other GTK dependant apps run too
I don’t think it’s necessary to have GTK for Mozilla anymore. The Qt port has been commited to Mozilla’s CVS.
I wish OpenOffice will support KDE network tools such as lisa or fish. I use OpenOffice heavily for daily ruotine job and I am tired of repeatedly mounting other computers each time I wanted to use their files.
The best maybe if Kofficewill matured as OpenOffice since it integrate very well with other KDE tools but I doubt it will in the near future.
Try having a look at Ximian OpenOffice.org, v1.3.x and higher uses KDE-dialogs (when xOOo is build with KDE integration)
http://ooo.ximian.com/ You properly have to build it yourself, since binary isn’t provided and most distros doesn’t provided for xOOo. You can get the builder (ooo-build) here http://ooo.ximian.com/packages/OOO_1_1_2/
This should read v1.1.3. 🙂 Also it uses the KDE file dialog but doesn’t support kio slaves yet.
I wish OpenOffice will support KDE network tools such as lisa or fish. I use OpenOffice heavily for daily ruotine job and I am tired of repeatedly mounting other computers each time I wanted to use their files.
Oh, but it does, if you install kio_fuse any linux program can use kdes kioslaves. You can either mount individual sites, or you can use the gateway.
More information can be found here:
http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=KIO+Fuse+Gateway
Here is a screenshot that shows OOwriter and GIMP using it:
http://www.unormal.org/kde-debian/swriter_gimp_fuse-kio-gateway.png
It does take some work to setup though, and as far as i know is linux only. Hopefully some of the distros will incorporate it eventually.
as for the fish vs sftp stuff, sftp uses the ftp protocol with encryption slapped on top while fish uses pure ssh. atleast thats my guess
FTP with encryption slapped on top is FTPS. The main difference between FISH and SFTP is that FISH is implemented entirely in the client and will work with any SSH server whereas SFTP requires support on the server side.
BTW, it would be nice if the KDE team provided a list of all the protocol handlers in a really easy to find place. The article certainly doesn’t cover them all. I use many of the protocols mentioned in the articles (man:/ and info:/ are great), but I had never heard of some of them (e.g. fonts:/).