When, in different applications, using the menu to open/save files, the dialog that appears might offer different choices. A lot of them lacks the ability to browse the network and connect to (in my case) a smb (samba) share on my NAS. My question: where is it going wrong ? Or which packages are buggy ?
I have samba installed on my machine (Xubuntu 12.10), and also gvfs and its backends.
With Thunar (1.5.3), I can easily access shares by:
- clicking the 'Browse Network' shortcut in the Side Pane,
- using self-made shortcuts directing to a folder on the share
- typing a path such as 'smb://datastore/action/Pictures'
When a share is not mounted yet, a dialog appears to enter my credentials.
Thunar adds the self-made shortcuts to the file ~/.gtk-bookmarks, and to be sure I linked it with .config/gtk-3.0/bookmarks.
In LibreOffice ( 3.6.2.2) I find the same shortcuts as in Thunar, only 'Browse Network' is missing. Shortcuts to a smb share do work but only for browsing. Typing in a path works as long as I end it with a '/' ('smb://datastore/action/' does work, 'smb://datastore/action' not).
When entering 'smb://datastore/' all shares are shown, but clicking them results in an error message "Not a directory".
When at last I click the Save button, I get an error-message stating "Path to the file does not exist". If I try to open a file, the dialog closes and nothing happens.
The erroneous behavior only seems to be associated with the dialog. Opening a LibreOffice file on the smb share by clicking it in Thunar does work, as does saving it by clicking the save button on the LibreOffice toolbar.
I tested Archive Manager (3.6.1.1), gThumb (3.0.2), Gimp (2.8.2) Inkscape (0.48.3.1) and Gnome MPlayer (1.0.6). They act similar to LibreOffice, although opening a file might work.
Looking at Firefox (17.0), Leafpad (0.8.18.1) and Audacity (2.0.1), I find no way to access smb shares. All shortcuts referring to a smb share are missing, typing a path that starts with 'smb://' yields no result.
So, where is the cause ? Is it gvfs, gtk, samba, the applications themselves, some packages missing ? And what about applications that rely on java, python, perl, ... Do they need additional packages to access smb shares ? Is this a problem only for smb shares ? Or is it common to all type of network shares ? Maybe it has to do with the recent change of mounting point (~/.gvfs/ -> /run/user/$USER/gvfs/) and its awful mappings ?
Anymore insight information is more than welcome !