Projects/KioFuse

Warning

This page describes an old version of KioFuse which does not compile on recent system (anything based on Qt5 or newer). It is kept for historical reference.

KioFuse allows you to mount remote directories into the root hierarchy of your local file system, thereby exposing KDE's advanced access capabilities (SSH, SAMBA/Windows, FTP, TAR/GZip/BZip2, WebDav, etc) to POSIX-compliant applications such as Firefox, OpenOffice, GNOME apps, shell utilities and more.

Usually, you would browse an FTP-server with firefox, but with KioFuse you can use Dolphin for that alternatively.

Another important advantage of KioFuse is that it allows you to arrange the hierarchy of all your remote, archived and compressed files in whichever way makes sense to you.

KioFuse works by acting as a bridge between KDE's KIO filesystem design and FUSE.

Installation

• Install kdelibs (version 4.0 or higher) provided by your Operating System or compile it according to these (non-existing) intructions.
• Type the following commands into a terminal:

svn checkout svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/libs/kiofuse
cd kiofuse
cmake .
make

Running KioFuse

• Mount with:

kiofuse --mountpoint <mountpoint> --URL <URL>

• Unmount with:

fusermount -u <mountpoint>

Real-world example: (Though in the actual real world no one would do this since clicking on a *.tar.gz file in Dolphin just enters the ZIPfile without further ado. If anything, kiofuse here slows down the user's workflow if he were to follow this guide.)

# Create the mount point
mkdir ~/fuse-source

# Download the compressed archive of the FUSE source code
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fuse/fuse-2.7.2.tar.gz -P ~

# Mount the archive in ~/fuse-source
./kiofuse --mountpoint ~/fuse-source --URL tar:~/fuse-2.7.2.tar.gz &

# Browse the source code in your favorite filemanager without ever needing to unpack the archive!
dolphin ~/fuse-source &
nautilus ~/fuse-source &
thunar ~/fuse-source &

Screenshots

Features and TODO

• Some KIO slaves such as tar: don't support seeking and therefore won't be able to read or write to files. Fixing these slaves is on the TODO list.
• KIO needs to be modified so that it is aware of KioFuse mounts and so that it uses its native functions (as opposed to POSIX) to access those resources.

POSIX Capabilities

See the FUSE API for the list of all file I/O commands.

Name	Description	Filename
GetAttr	Permissions, Owner, Group	Done
ReadLink	Determine destination of link	Done
MkNod	Create file	Done
MkDir	Create a directory	Done
UnLink	Remove a symlink	Done
RmDir	Remove a directory	Done
SymLink	Create a symlink	Done
Rename	Rename a file or directory	Done
Link	Create a hard link	Done
Chmod	Change permissions of a file or directory	Done
Chown	Change owner of a file or directory	Done
Truncate	Change the size of a file	Done
Open	Open a file for reading, writing, and/or truncating	Done
Read	Read the contents of a file	Done
Write	Write data to a file	Done
StatFS	Get Filesystem Statistics	Not Started
Flush	Flush cached data	Not Started
Release	Close an opened file	Done
FSync	Synchronize file contents	Not Started
SetXAttr	Set external attributes	Not Started
GetXAttr	Get external attributes	Not Started
ListXAttr	List external attributes	Not Started
RemoveXAttr	Remove external attributes	Not Started
OpenDir	Open a directory	Not Started
ReadDir	List files and subdirectories	Done
ReleaseDir	Release directory	Not Started
FSyncDir	Synchronize directory contents	Not Started
Init	Initialize filesystem	Not Started
Destroy	Clean up filesystem	Not Started
Access	Check file access permissions	Work In Progress
Create	Create and open a file	Not Started
FTruncate	Change the size of an open file	Not Started
FGetAttr	Get attributes of an open file	Not Started
Lock	Lock a resource	Not Started
UTimeNS	Change the access and mod times in nanoseconds	Not Started

Source Code

The source code to KioFuse can be browsed at: http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/libs/kiofuse/