gvfs-enabled Nautilus

Alexander Larsson has been working on gvfs, which will replace gnome-vfs. His blog is some good background on the work he's been doing. You can also check out the ToDo for more information. In their quest to bring all things awesome to Ubuntu users, Sebastien Bacher and Loic Minier are pushing this new Nautilus into hardy:

What I'm doing here is copy three files from a remote ssh share to my desktop. Check out how it queues up the file transfer windows. It's currently pretty rough, for example, the "Network" and "Connect to Server" doesn't work in the Places menu, and there currently is no ftp backend. You can test it by hitting ctrl-l and typing in an sftp url. I have found the performance to be quite good vs. gnome-vfs. The most notable advantage over gnome-vfs is that I don't feel the need to kill myself every time I do a network transfer.

How to help

Since this is a pretty new feature Sebastien is looking for brave bugtesters to pound on Nautilus and start filing bugs. Please start reporting bugs to Launchpad. Alexander Larsson, for the win.

Comments

[Peteris Krisjanis]

I saw that hardy got gvfs this morning trough updates. I used my usual ssh connection to home today and it's worked like nothing has changed - that's good sign, because user should see only benefits, not that something is borked.

I will try to copy something to see if it's stable in active. Also I wait for FTP backend. Ohh, and Samba backend must be extensively tested too ;)

[Kevin]

Looks good. Its a shame that Thunar development seems to have stalled.

[Nice]

That reminds me of Mathusalem which the maintainer dropped after the SoC ended... it would be real nice if Mathusalem could be integrated throughout the gnome deskto, I love the idea of a single status window for all transfers, whether it be downloads in Firefox, writing a CD, copying files to a network, etc...

[Zealot]

Hooray for BeOS-ish screenshots! The 'stacked' file operations dialog gives me that nostalgic feeling. Good to see GNOME catching up :)