Zentyal Desktop Link to Shares

[SamK]

Topic arose from reply #2, #3, #4 in this post: http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=feedd9ece31aa1c0b8cc5d587bb7a3b2&topic=5346.msg21863

It seems there is an opportunity here to provide flexibility and choice in the way Zentyal Desktop handles Samba shares (and do it quite simply).  As a non coder I am unable to provide a coded contribution but offer the findings of my tests which are repeatable and clearly demonstrate a workable proof of concept.  They can be recreated by anyone who wishes to do so.

After making the above post I created a test setup.  Unrestricted Samba shares were published to the LAN and a test-rig-PC created based on Lubuntu 10.10.  PAM was not used in order to avoid uneccessary complication at this time as it will be unchanged by either of the following choices.

Connection to the remote shares from the test-rig-PC appears to rely on a local installation of gvfs and gvfs-backends (Ubuntu repositories).  These are required packages common to both the Nautilus and PCmanFM ways of graphically browsing the shares.  GVFS creates local mounts to the remote shares in ~/.gvfs; this can be accessed from the command line, Nautilus, and PCmanFM which suggests that the use of Nautilus within Zentyal Desktop is optional rather than required.  In essence, discovering, mounting, and presenting the shares uses exactly the same packages and mechanisms for either Nautilus or PCmanFM. In this respect, removing Nautilus and substituting PCmanFM requires no other changes, they are entirely interchangable without modification.

Symlinks to ~/.gvfs were also tested and found work.  This enables easy access to the shares from the File Open/Save menus of locally installed apps such as a word processor.  As a further (optional) refinement Gigolo was installed (http://www.uvena.de/gigolo) again from the Ubuntu repositories. This provides a GUI frontend to GVFS and confers other benefits such as:

• Bookmarks to remote resources
• Automatic connection to Samba shares
• Automatic connection to WebDAV, ftp, ssh etc

Empirical or partially measured tests were conducted and both options worked reliably.  Using Nautilus felt sluggish compared with PCmanFM. Nautilus certainly requires more CPU and RAM and may thereby be unsuited to the widest range of existing PCs. A fully working Lubuntu-10.10+gvfs+gvfs-backends+gigolo provided quite acceptable levels of performance on the venerable test-rig-PC and used approximately 100MB memory for a basic set-up.  This may indicate it is well suited to use on a wide range of existing kit.

LXDE is the default desktop of Lubuntu and PCmanFM the default file-manager but neither is dependent on it or each other.  Both are widely used in other flavours of Ubuntu and you may recall I posted this guide demonstrating a way in which it could be added to eBox.
http://forum.zentyal.org/index.php?topic=1260.0
It is entirely possible for an existing desktop user of the full (Gnome) Ubuntu to choose LXDE and or PCmanFM to gain the advantage of smaller resource usage and increase in performance.

My request is not to support another distribution or flavour of Ubuntu but to enable use of mainstream Ubuntu packages in order to confer the most advantage to the end user.  The above tests demonstrate this can be achieved at no additional support cost and marginal single coding cost.  As a non-coder I may not be the best candidate to make suggestions on how to undertake integration.  As both options are interchangable it suggests that only a minimal amount of coding will be required to offer the choice at installation.

From the perspective of a desktop user, Zentyal Office functions are likely to be a primary requirement.  Confining the ease of set-up of a *buntu desktop by requiring Nautilus is uneccessarily restrictive, produces degraded performance and hinders the redeployment of existing PCs.  As we are only at the alpha testing stage and inviting feedback, it seems that the desktop client can be independant of the default Gnome file-manager.  This in turn provides an opportunity for Zentyal Desktop to be used on a wider range of existing machines which must help secure the use and success of Zentyal.

Are these findings sufficent for integration to occur?


Note:
Lubuntu 10.10 mistakenly omitted gvfs-backends from the release and must currently be installed manually.  I understand this will be rectified in the next release.