Bring fuse to the desktop

[nf2]

Mildred wrote:
> Hi,
>
> i thought that it could be interesting to be able to use FUSE from the
> desktop without having to use the command line.
>
> I'm thinking of special desktop files that tells the filemanager how to
> mount using fuse some files depending on their mime type.
>
> or desktop files to tell the desktop how to handle and mount some
> network resources (identified by an URI that would match a regular
> expression in the desktop file)
>
> And then the desktop would mount all this in ~/.mnt for example.
>
> Do you think it already exists ?
> Do you think it is worthwhile to do something like that ?
>
> Mildred
>
>   

Yes, it exists (i'm working on it):

"libfusi" is a library to manage mounts of certain FUSE network 
filesystems (sshfs, curlftpfs, fusesmb, wdfs). It also provides a 
network-neighborhood browsing interface for SMB, to allow users to 
select the shares they wants to mount.

"gfuse-manager" is a standalone Gtk+ GUI, which uses libfusi. It uses 
gnome-keyring to store passwords. As the GUI is separated from the 
management interface, libfusi could be integrated into KDE/Gnome 
file-managers and file-choosers in the future (that was the initial idea).

http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/devel/fusi/

i believe the next step would be to write a KDE4 frontend (which uses 
KWallet to store passwords) for libfusi. Also, libfusi and gfuse-manager 
need more testing on different linux distributions. As far as i can 
tell, they seem to work well on Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04.

Furthermore, Gnome-VFS, KIO and file-managers need to be improved to 
recognize FUSE mounts properly (recognize them as slow, remote 
filesystems and suppress rendering of previews and not create .Trash). 
And some applications still have problems with working on FUSE mounts - 
gedit refuses to save files on fusesmb for instance.

So there is lots of work to do. Your help is welcome. :-)

Norbert