The server in this case is a nas but I'm sure there is nothing amiss at that end. Took me a while to establish what part of the system was causing the problem so eventually searched for files containing "Can Only Select Local Files". Turns out to be one of several K so files. I can't go any further than that. I connected to the nas via dolphin. Later tried samba but the results were the same only far to slow when it chooses to find the server. Dolphin goes straight in no messing about,

Taking kwrite to show that the paths work. I can launch click off the nas. I can save to the nas and read from the nas. Only issue is reading from the nas, modifying and saving back to the nas. The file is updated but no backup is generated.

Taking amarok. I can click launch and play a file off the nas. If I use a file like that as part of a play list amarok can't cope with it. It accepts it and complains when the play list is used. If I try and load a file in amarok from the nas it wont do it.

Kaffeine wont do anything with files on the nas. I complains about a missing plugin. I can find no such plugin so I wonder if this is old code unused these days piping up.

PDF's can be click launched of the nas and ocular loads them. I can save as onto the nas as well. I haven't tried acrobat yet but need to use it as some of the book scans I use are far too slow in ocular. I also have djvu's.

LibrOffice responds to click launches off the nas but that's about it. Saves appear to work but the files don't change. Loads come up with the error message.

As I had problems with kaffeine I installed VLC as it comes kitted out for working off servers. It wont do anything off the nas. KDE looks to be preventing this from the error message. I also found this bug
https://bugs.kde.org/253547
Well the .desktop file does contain the correct incantations but I can't help wondering why these are needed. Data files may be anywhere these days and would have thought that sort of thing should be the responsibility of file management or really the user. Must admit having seen what vlc can do I will probably want to use it till kaffeine catches up again.

I'm hoping for a work around but it seems to me that this is a bug. KDE may have made a rod for it's own back. On the other hand it seems these sort of things have worked in the past. Hard to be sure. Some for instance have reported avi's etc being downloaded before playing even thought the app can stream. VLC for instance has an additional buffering delay for files on a server.

Please be gentle with any work arounds as I am one of those that only go to the shell if I must. This is usually just to compile apps when I have too.

John

OPenSuse 11.4 KDE 4.6.0 issue 6

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Just prove that kde has no need to get in the way of loads from the nas I have found a way to get it to work.

Create an icon on the desktop. I used VLC. Drag the file out of dolphin onto the icon and it plays it. Just as it starts playing kde fire up the following error message

Sorry-Plasma Desktop Shell
Could not find the program 'smb://192.168.1.99/Volume_1/John/test.avi'
This error steals the focus from the entire desktop.

Kaffiene still looks for an input plugin that as far as I can tell has never existed.

From it's content libkio.so may be the culprit. I have .4 and 4.20 in 64bit on my machine in /kde3/lib64/. Also could be libkfile.so or same.4 and .4.6.0 or even kcm_keys.so. These are in ///usr/lib64/. There are also .mo files but I assume these are messages as stated. Must admit I do wonder why they are in the both types of file though.

I have had mixed 32/64bit code on my machine. At the moment only an old version of Kaffeine is 32bit.

Off topic I've just found kaffeine (64) is being opened to receive downloaded rpms. No save offered. Might be down to opera's web site.

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Your best solution is to mount it (the network server) into the file system at this point. If the KDE Auto Mounter doesn't work, try your distributions tools, which should be able to help here.

I used the opensuse tools yesterday to try and format and auto mount a scsii drive out of curiosity really. Couldn't be done event though from disk activity the kernel recognised that it was present.
Off topic but I didn't notice any signs of the ability to map the nas. If I do I would rather avoid samba and just use dolphins access. Samba takes ages to find and read the drive each time it's used for the first time in an application.

I have filed this as a bug via novell/opensuse and will add the drag and drop details to it but one question if some one can answer. VLC is a qt4 program. I did try dragging a file into it's window but nothing happened. Should VLC have been aware of the file and tried to load it? I ask because when I try and load from the nas using vlc I get a vlc error message "can't load file". This appears to be entirely down to kde but it doesn't generate it's own error message. There is also the side issue that VLC appears to be capable of loading a network file without using samba.

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Bit of an improvement I set up the nas to use NFS as well as CIFS. The kde auto mounter now works but when I log into KDE it takes a long long time to start to work. Previously it started as soon as the desktop faded in completely. I am also getting the impression that NFS is slower than CIFS and of course there is no facility for setting up NFS in dolphin. Opting for CIFS makes sense to me though.

VLC can now be used via right click open with directly on the nas. If I use VLC to open a file on the nas it fails out with the error message I mention. The interface looks like an instance of dolphin? so maybe it still trying via CIFS. Looks like there are some oddities with ark as well. Then there's the gimp. open office etc ect etc. I can't try a click launch to VLC as the associations have changed through trying another version of kaffeine. I'm sort of hoping that there is some way of restoring earlier associations as it will play rather a lot of things including audio.

One good thing VLC does stream this way. I have read reports of files being completely downloaded before playing.

No joy with Kaffeine it still wants an input plugin.

Still looks like a mess to me though and I hope the dot desktop aspects change. In my humble opinion it would be more realistic to allow all and use dis allow logic in the .desktop files just for it is needed. The allow aspect clearly isn't working at the moment anyway.

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At this point I would recommend using either the CIFS or NFS methods and mount the NAS into your system directly. See http://opensuse.swerdna.org/susesambacifs.html for instance.

Thanks for the link I will have a close look.

If it's suggesting using samba I have already been down the route via yast the opensuse system tool. I also briefly looked at the same way of setting up nfs. At this level there didn't seem to be away of entering a fixed ip address for the server. The delays on mounting seem to be down to searching for servers. Also while using samba I noticed that it's extremely slow the first time the file management is used in an application. This even happens when another application is used afterwards. I assume from the set up in yast that nfs will be the same. Dolphin on the other hand does allow a direct ip address to be added so access is more or less the same as using the local disc. Unfortunately the same problem will relate to all of them as follows.

An applications desktop file can now contains a statement to indicate what types of protocols it can use. VLC's for instance contains this one

X-KDE-Protocols=http,ftp,smb,sftp

This part of kde is currently broken so kde is preventing applications from working in certain ways. I say that on the basis that I have shown that the paths do work so there is no need for kde to interfere. I've effectively found a hole through the software. Mounting the nas solves some of the limitations but not all of them. Basically kde still prevents loads and saves from within an application itself. Kwrite works perfectly in all respects and maybe other strict K applications do as well. Kwrite doesn't contain the same incantation. I'm inclined to go further and ask why the protocols facility is needed. I can't think of any reason and have asked in several places but so far no response. If this software wasn't present working on a nas would just be a case of assigning a fixed ip to it, connecting with dolphin and away it would go just like kwrite. No delays and server searches etc. I haven't looked to see if many apps could work like this. Gimp for instance seems to have no ability what so ever to work with files on the network. That's something I need actually. LibreOffice is blocked by kde so could function in this way. I also need to use acrobat and djvu but haven't installed them yet.

Just thought I haven't tried removing the protocols statement. Doubt if that will work but may as well try.

One other interesting aspect is that enabling NFS caused kde's auto mount to function but according to the nas log all transfers are occurring via CIF. Mounting opens more holes in the protocols software and allows me to do more with some none kde apps but dolphin and kwrite at least do not need the server to be explicitly mounted. Ideally the same should be true for all applications.

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I just tried slowly making the desktop file as near the one for kwrite as I could. No improvement.

When you mount the NAS into the system, you would have specified a path to mount it into such as /nas in YaST. As far as I am aware, you should be able to enter an IP address, at least for NFS.

Once you have done this, simply accessing /nas in Dolphin (and not nfs:// or smb:// paths) should show the content of your NAS.

Using yast I tried the button that looks for nfs servers on network, It failed to find one yet enabling nfs on the nas had already caused kde's automount to function. It didn't appear to do anything at all until I did that. In all cases the line added to fstab looked exactly the same as several examples on the web.

I tried a variety of changes in yast. eventually adding rw and user to the options. Yast failed to start the service but did create the access folder. When I clicked it dolphin came up with an error message - no nfs server. I noticed that mount has an option to use cifs. Yast just wouldn't accept it so I manually changed fstab. This caused a not supported error message and some thing like root suid was mentioned when I accessed the folder with dolphin. I had set user. I also tried adding and later removing both nfs and cifs to /etc/filesystem. Made no difference. I do have cifs-utils installed.

Argggggggggggggggg.

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Try reading this thread and performing the steps manually... http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... ab-461202/

Thanks I will try that tomorrow.

Is there anyway of getting the system to reread fstab without rebooting or can the same line be entered from the prompt?

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If you run "mount -a" then any file systems in /etc/fstab which aren't mounted will be mounted. The command needs to be run as root.

This line in fstab and I am nearly there. LibreOffice and Gimp now have read/write access and vlc can open files on the nas directly. Haven't tried saving from that but should be ok.

Code: Select all

//192.168.1.13/Volume /home/john/Desktop/NAS cifs uid=john,gid=users 0 0


My user name on the nas is the same as my kde name - this may matter.

The only major problem is that I would rather log into the nas when I access it. With the line as it is I need to run mount -a as root if I reboot. I could add the auth parts but would rather not. The main problem here is that the password needs to be the nas password and on the face of it any user would be able to do what they like with the nas.

Secondary problems. From the error messages as I played with the line in fstab it's using mount-cif so I would like to completely remove other attempts such as the dolphin connect and samba. Removing the entries from samba in YAST also removed the dolphin network share. Samba shares now contain nothing but I can't remove the icon. Disabling kde auto mount didn't cause any problems at all.

There is also one other aspect that doesn't look to good. Permissions on the NAS folder allow all, user,group and anyone r/w access. I can't change these via dolphin as a user or as root. These aren't the default permissions so I presumably need to change the gid or omit it completely? Or maybe create a new group with only me in it?

It's also hard to be sure that samba isn't running - I selected manual start a while ago and something or the other re enabled it to start on boot.

Came across and interesting tutorial on samba see
http://tweakhound.com/linux/suse/114/samba1.html
The web interface is interesting but unfortunately all of the help files associated with it aren't installed. I should be able to roll back the changes that suggests to system settings. Then I wonder about netbios,ldap ect etc etc.

At the moment this looks like a work around and assume that other users could be catered for with further fstab entries if needed.

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You should be able to add some mount options to the cifs file system entry in fstab which control the permissions assigned to the mount point. I suspect it is labeled "mode" or something similar.