Thunar
Thunar is a new file manager that is designed to be fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use. It is a part of Xfce4, but can be used with various standalone window managers.
Contents
Installation
Install the thunar package which is available in the official repositories.
If you are running Xfce4, you probably already have Thunar installed.
Automounting
Thunar and Xfce4 are in transition from using HAL and ThunarVFS, being currently deprecated, to using GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit and the kernel udev architecture for detecting and automounting removable media. All the information is actual as of 16 August 2011 and Xfce 4.8.
Storage group
First of all you need to make sure that your user account is a member of the storage group.
$ groups
lp wheel games video audio optical storage scanner power users
If it is not, be sure to include the user in the storage group of /etc/group using the following command:
# usermod -a -G storage <user>
PolicyKit
If you are using a display manager to start your window manager or desktop environment session, see the documentation for your display manager to properly start your session with PolicyKit. For example, starting PolicyKit when using SLiM.
If you are not using a display manager, include ck-launch-session and dbus-launch (in that order) before the command to launch the window manager or desktop environment in ~/.xinitrc: see the specific article for your WM or DE, e.g. Xfce. For example:
exec ck-launch-session dbus-launch <your wm>
Note that ck-launch-session comes before dbus-launch. If you do them the other way around you might get "Not authorized" errors when you try to mount your drive. See this forum thread and bug report FS#25031.
If you are not using a display manager (e.g. GDM, SLiM) and are having problems mounting, have a look at this wiki article.
GVFS and trash issue
If automounting is still not working you will finally need GVFS:
# pacman -S gvfs
This should also help to enable trash if you have no trash icon on the desktop and adding a trash applet on the taskbar creates a red circle with a white minus instead with the error message saying
FAILED TO CONNECT TO THE TRASH. Operation not supported.
when clicking on it.
Mounting problems after package update
Even if mounting usually works, after some package update it breaks, leaving you with the "Not Authorized" error. Solution is to configure PolicyKit to allow mounting for users in storage group, regardless of the state of their session, by writing as root to file/etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/10-storage-group-mount-override.pkla
[storage group mount override] Identity=unix-group:storage Action=org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount ResultAny=yes ResultInactive=yes ResultActive=yes
Results should be instantaneous.
Thunar Volume Manager
While Thunar can support automatic mounting and unmounting of removable media, the Thunar Volume Manager allows extended functionality, such as auto-running commands or automatically opening a Thunar window for mounted media.
Installation
It can be installed by running:
# pacman -S thunar-volman
Configuration
It can also be configured to execute certain actions when cameras and audio players are connected. After installing the plugin:
- Launch Thunar and go to Edit -> Preferences
- Under the 'Advanced' tab, check 'Enable Volume Management'
- Click configure and check the following items:
- Mount removable drives when hot-pluged.
- Mount removable media when inserted.
- Also make desired changes (see the example below)
Here's an example setting for making Amarok play an audio CD.
Multimedia - Audio CDs: amarok --cdplay %d
Tips and Tricks
Using Thunar to browse remote locations
Since Xfce 4.8 (Thunar 1.2) it is possible to browse remote locations (such as FTP servers or Samba shares) directly in Thunar, similar to the functionality found in GNOME and KDE. The necessary packages can be installed by running:
# pacman -S gvfs gvfs-smb
After a restart of Xfce there is an additional "Network" entry in Thunar's side bar and remote locations can be opened by using the following URIs in the location dialog (CTRL+L): smb://, ftp://, ssh://
Starting in Daemon Mode
Thunar may be run in daemon mode. This has several advantages including a faster startup for Thunar as well as Thunar running in the background and only opening a window when necessary (for instance, when a flash drive is inserted).
One option is to autostart it using .xinitrc or an autostart script (such as Openbox's autostart). It is up to you to decide the best way to start it, and this option can be run from a script or run directly as a command in the terminal.
To run it in daemon mode, simply add to your autostart script or run from the terminal:
$ thunar --daemon &
Eliminating Conflicts
If you have hal and autofs running at the same time, you will have a lock in hal-mtab. To avoid this, use only one of them.
If you cannot get automount running and start your window manager via .xinitrc you maybe want to change the start line for your window manger from
$ exec /usr/bin/dwm
to
$ exec ck-launch-session /usr/bin/dwm
Setting the Icon Theme
When using Thunar outside of Gnome or Xfce, certain packages and configurations that control which icons are used may be missing. Window Managers like Awesome and Xmonad do not come with XSettings managers, which is where Thunar looks first for it's icon setting. It is possible to install and run xfce-mcs-manager from a startup script if many Xfce4 and Gnome applications are going to be used. The gtk-icon-theme-name setting for gtk2 can be set for a user by adding something like the following to ~/.gtkrc-2.0:
gtk-icon-theme-name = "Tango"
Of course, just installing the gnome-icon-them package will give Thunar an icon theme to use other than the default paper icon for all items.
# pacman -S gnome-icon-theme
Solving problem with slow cold start
Some people still have problems with Thunar taking a long time to start for the first time. This is due to gvfs checking the network and Thunar won't show up before gvfs finishes. To change this behaviour:$ nano /usr/share/gvfs/mounts/network.mountand change AutoMount=true to AutoMount=false.
Other plugins and addons
Many of these plugins are part of the xfce4-goodies group, so if you have downloaded it, you will probably have all of these anyway.
Thunar Archive Plugin
The Thunar Archive Plugin is a frontend to file archive software such as File Roller, Ark, or Xarchiver to allow a simple, consistent interface to opening and decompressing archives.
Installation
It can be installed by running:
# pacman -S thunar-archive-plugin
Thunar Media Tags Plugin
The media tags plugin will display detailed information about media files. It supports ID3 (the MP3 file format's system) and Ogg/Vorbis tags. It also has a bulk renamer and allows editing of media tags.
Installation
It can be installed by running:
# pacman -S thunar-media-tags-plugin
Thunar thumbnails
Thunar relies on an external program called tumbler to generate thumbnails. tumbler cam be installed from [extra]. Installing ffmpegthumbnailer will allow tumbler to generate video thumbnails.
The Thunar Shares Plugin allows you to quickly share a folder using Samba from Thunar without requiring root access.
Installation
Install thunar-shares-plugin package from the AUR.
Configuration
This marks the named objects for automatic export to the environment of subsequently executed commands:
# export USERSHARES_DIR="/var/lib/samba/usershares" # export USERSHARES_GROUP="sambashare"
This creates the usershares directory in var/lib/samba:
# mkdir -p ${USERSHARES_DIR}
This makes the group sambashare:
# groupadd ${USERSHARES_GROUP}
This changes the owner of the directory and group you just created to root:
# chown root:${USERSHARES_GROUP} ${USERSHARES_DIR}
This changes the permissions of the usershares directory so that users in the group sambashare can read, write and execute files:
# chmod 01770 ${USERSHARES_DIR}
Using your favorite text editor as root, create the file /etc/samba/smb.conf
# joe /etc/samba/smb.conf
Use this smb.conf configuration file:
/etc/samba/smb.conf
##This is the main Samba configuration file. You should read the ##smb.conf(5) manual page in order to understand the options listed ##here. Samba has a huge number of configurable options (perhaps too ##many!) most of which are not shown in this example ## ##For a step to step guide on installing, configuring and using samba, ## read the Samba-HOWTO-Collection. This may be obtained from: ## http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection.pdf ## ## Many working examples of smb.conf files can be found in the ## Samba-Guide which is generated daily and can be downloaded from: ## http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/Samba-Guide.pdf ## ## Any line which starts with a ; (semi-colon) or a # (hash) ## is a comment and is ignored. In this example we will use a # ## for commentry and a ; for parts of the config file that you ## may wish to enable ## ## NOTE: Whenever you modify this file you should run the command "testparm" ## to check that you have not made any basic syntactic errors. ## #[global] # workgroup = WORKGROUP # security = share # server string = My Share # load printers = yes # log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log # max log size = 50 # usershare path = /var/lib/samba/usershares # usershare max shares = 100 # usershare allow guests = yes # usershare owner only = yes # # # #Windows Internet Name Serving Support Section: # # #WINS Support - Tells the NMBD component of Samba to enable it's WINS Server #; wins support = yes # ## WINS Server - Tells the NMBD components of Samba to be a WINS Client ## Note: Samba can be either a WINS Server, or a WINS Client, but NOT both #; wins server = w.x.y.z # ##WINS Proxy - Tells Samba to answer name resolution queries on ## behalf of a non WINS capable client, for this to work there must be ## at least one WINS Server on the network. The default is NO. #; wins proxy = yes
Save the file and then add your user to the group sambashares replacing "your_username" with the name of your user:
# usermod -a -G <USERSHARES_GROUP> your_username
Restart Samba:
# /etc/rc.d/samba restart
Log out and log back in. You should now be able to right click on any directory and share it on the network.
To have samba start at boot, add samba to daemons in your /etc/rc.conf file.
For more information, visit the Samba wiki page.
Custom actions
This section covers useful custom actions which can be accessed through Edit -> Configure custom actions. More examples are listed in the thunar wiki.
Scan for viruses
To use this action you need to have clamav and clamtk installed.
| Name | Command | File patterns | Appears if selection contains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scan for virus | clamtk %F | * | Select all |
Link to Dropbox =
| Name | Command | File patterns | Appears if selection contains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Link to Dropbox | ln -s %f /path/to/DropboxFolder | * | Directories, other files |
Please note that when using many custom actions to symlink files and folder to a particular place, it might be useful to put them into the Send To folder of the context menu to avoid that the menu itself gets bloated. This is fairly easy to achieve and requires a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/Thunar/sendto for each action to perform. Say we want to put the above dropbox symlink action into Send To, we create a dropbox_folder.desktop with the following content. The new applied action will be active after restarting Thunar.
[Desktop Entry] Type=Application Version=1.0 Encoding=UTF-8 Exec=ln -s %f /path/to/DropboxFolder Icon=/usr/share/icons/dropbox.png Name=Dropbox
Links and References
- Thunar project page.
- Thunar Volume Manager project page.
- Thunar Archive Plugin project page.
- Thunar Media Tags Plugin project page.
- Thunar Shares Plugin project page.
- This list of plugins.