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Whatewr happened to the graphic frontend to encfs

Posted:
Aug 6th, '24, 02:15
by rodgoslin
I'm still building Mageia 9, on the new PC, and have arrived at the installation of the graphic form of encfs, that ran so well on Mageia 7. Searching through MCC I find that the bare bones command line encfs is still there, but of the multitude of supporting applications (gnome-encfs-manager for one) is entirely absent. I realise that the graphical version is merely a frontend for the command line operation, but, it was so simple to use. A single click and password would mount and open the plaintext, and another single click would close it
Re: Whatewr happened to the graphic frontend to encfs

Posted:
Aug 6th, '24, 12:46
by sturmvogel
gnome-encfs-manager was removed 4 years ago from the distribution as it is incompatible with current Gnome versions. Only Alt Linux and Arch drag around this dead package in their repos. All other distributions already removed it.
Did you try sirikali which is available in the Mageia repos?
Re: Whatewr happened to the graphic frontend to encfs

Posted:
Aug 7th, '24, 02:23
by rodgoslin
H, Sturmvogel. Thanks for the post. It did jog my failing memory, and I recalled that I posted the same question quite a while back. I had installed Mageia 8 on a test machine, before committing my active machine, and the non existence of graphic encfs, in vers 8 was one of the reasons I never upgraded my day to day machine, and why myold laptop is still running vers 7. It took the total failure of my main machine, and a couple of months later, the total failure of the backup machine, leaving me falling back onto the laptop. I've now bitten the bullet and bought two lenovo ThinkCentres', but perforce I have to load Mageia 9, since whilst ves 7 is now not only unsupported, but the mirror sites have been withdrawn too.
Back to your suggestion for sirikali. I've given it a try. It loaded without trouble and in many aspects it was like the Gnome version, and as usual, it was largely incompehensible. It took a while to realise that it works backwards on relative to the Gnome version. Gnome has the plaintext directory as part of the normal file structure, and as such, is grouped with all the other working directories, and the encrypted directory as hidden (.) directory. The plaintext directory is mounted as and when required. Sirikali, on the other hand, works the other way round. . The hidden directory holds the plaintext, and is mounted when required, and the encrypted files are in a permanent normal directory. The plaintext is loaded into Dolphin, a file manager I've always disliked, as being a dumbed down file manager characteristic of a Windows presentation, instead of Konqueror which I've long considered as the best file manager I've ever met. However in settings I think I can turn things around and have Konqueror open up the plaintext directory. I'll let you know, if it works
Re: Whatewr happened to the graphic frontend to encfs

Posted:
Aug 7th, '24, 03:54
by rodgoslin
Well. that did not go well. I gave Cryptkeeper another shot, I'd balked at an earlier try, since there never seems to be an explanation of what the options actually mean. This time I just accepted things as they were. And it worked. It does exactly what the Gnome version did, presented in exactly the same way. So, on the face of it, it's exactly what I require. I;ll give it a few days to try all the bells and whistles, and if all goes well, I'll close the topic.
Re: Whatewr happened to the graphic frontend to encfs

Posted:
Aug 7th, '24, 09:11
by morgano
Sirikali worked well for me when I tried it a couple years ago, syncing the encrypted folder using Nextcloud.
Generally i think it is good to avoid desktop-tied solutions.