My preferred file managers:
- Dolphin
- Files (x11-fm/nautilus)
– currently 4.14.10 and 3.18.5, respectively.
… smb … OpenOffice / LibreOffice. … I cannot find any mounted folders for this location. And from the office program I cannot find the smb path.
I often wondered about the absence of a relevant mount point after using smb:// in, for example, Dolphin.
Whilst not having a technical understanding of the causes of peculiarities, I typically found myself using Files instead of Dolphin whenever I needed to use Windows file servers at work.
Last week the peculiarities were greater than usual. Whilst editing one remote file – an .xlsx workbook – with two different computers (one FreeBSD-based, one Windows 7) in different rooms at different times, I realised that changes saved by LibreOffice Calc were
not suitably effective until long after an apparent save. At the time of writing I do not have access to the server, to reproduce the symptom, but if I recall correctly:
- the one end result, of all saves by the application, was not saved to the SMB server until after the file was closed by the application.
Later in the day I vaguely recall seeing an SMB-specific message in LibreOffice – maybe in a status bar; maybe whilst I worked with Files in lieu of Dolphin. (I didn't stop to take notes, too busy at the time, sorry.)
I aim to review things next week. Hopefully with enough time for attention to file locking behaviours and so on.
In the meantime, I found a few things of interest:
- KDE bug 253547 – Regression: since 4.5.2, KDE downloads multimedia files instead of letting applications stream them (2010-10-07)
- at freedesktop.org, The [FONT=Courier New]Exec[/FONT] key
- in openSUSE Forums, Libreoffice and samba remote files problem (2014-10-03) – this puts points 1 and 2 in context
- gvfs - How do applications open from/save to smb shares? - Ask Ubuntu (2012-12-02)
Desktop files for LibreOffice Calc
$ grep -i exec /usr/local/lib/libreoffice/share/xdg/calc.desktop
Code:
Exec=libreoffice --calc %U
Exec=libreoffice --calc
$ grep -i exec /usr/local/share/applications/libreoffice-calc.desktop
Code:
Exec=libreoffice --calc %U
Exec=libreoffice --calc
$ grep -v \# /usr/local/share/applications/libreoffice-calc.desktop
Code:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Terminal=false
Icon=libreoffice-calc
Type=Application
Categories=Office;Spreadsheet;X-Red-Hat-Base;X-MandrivaLinux-Office-Spreadsheets;
Exec=libreoffice --calc %U
MimeType=application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-template;application/vnd.sun.xml.calc;application/vnd.sun.xml.calc.template;application/msexcel;application/vnd.ms-excel;application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet;application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroenabled.12;application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template;application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroenabled.12;application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroenabled.12;text/csv;application/x-dbf;text/spreadsheet;application/csv;application/excel;application/tab-separated-values;application/vnd.lotus-1-2-3;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart-template;application/x-dbase;application/x-dos_ms_excel;application/x-excel;application/x-msexcel;application/x-ms-excel;application/x-quattropro;application/x-123;text/comma-separated-values;text/tab-separated-values;text/x-comma-separated-values;text/x-csv;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-flat-xml;application/vnd.ms-works;application/clarisworks;application/x-iwork-numbers-sffnumbers;
Name=LibreOffice Calc
GenericName=Spreadsheet
GenericName[en]=Spreadsheet
Comment=Perform calculations, analyze information and manage lists in spreadsheets by using Calc.
Comment[en]=Perform calculations, analyze information and manage lists in spreadsheets by using Calc.
StartupNotify=true
X-GIO-NoFuse=true
Keywords=Accounting;Stats;OpenDocument Spreadsheet;Chart;Microsoft Excel;Microsoft Works;OpenOffice Calc;ods;xls;xlsx;
InitialPreference=5
StartupWMClass=libreoffice-calc
X-KDE-Protocols=file,http,ftp,webdav
Actions=NewDocument;
[Desktop Action NewDocument]
Name=New Spreadsheet
Name[en]=New Spreadsheet
Exec=libreoffice --calc
Streamlining and automation
Ideally I would be able to mount this (and have it re-mount automatically during boot up) so that it appears as a folder that is selectable from programs. Ideally I would like to do this via the KDE4 desktop, but doing it from command line is fine too.
For SMB, GNOME Files (on KDE 4.14.3) does not work as expected with my default keyring. So it's less streamlined than I'd like. For this, I should probably follow up in a separate topic.