2004.11_Endeavour Mark Ii-Managing and Archiving Files with Endeavour.pdf

LINUX USER

Endeavour Mark II

File Alternative

File managers and image viewers are an integral part of desktop environments

like Konqueror and Nautilus. But this does not mean that users with more

simple window managers have to do without the convenience file managers

and image viewers provide. BY HAGEN HÖPFNER

entering tar xjf endeavour-2.4.4.tar.bz2

or tar xzf endeavour-2.4.4.tgz . This cre-

ates an endeavour-2.4.4 subdirectory.

Change to the subdirectory and run the

following commands as root:

the programs are not essential to running

the file manager.

Getting Started

Type endeavour2 to launch the file man-

ager. By default, Endeavour comes up

with the file manager view (Figure 1)

with a file system tree on the left and the

contents of the selected directory on the

right.

You can use the location box, which

shows you the current directory, for

quick navigation. To change to another

directory, simply type the target path

into the box. The location box supports

tab-based auto complete; it will finish off

typing for you if you provide enough

information to uniquely identify a target

directory. To avoid typing altogether, you

can simply click the arrow to the right of

the location box. This tells Endeavour to

open the history and give you a selection

of paths that you have visited previously.

If you do not need the location bar,

T hanks to Konqueror and Nautilus,

./configure Linux

make

su -c "make install"

users with Gnome and KDE rarely

need to worry about console-based

file management, and both file managers

have integrated image viewers. But some

users prefer to avoid the mainstream

desktops. For others Konqueror and Nau-

tilus are just too slow, and this means

looking around for alternatives. Endeav-

our Mark II [1] is one alternative that is

just as fast as it is functional.

to configure, build, and install Endeav-

our. The Linux option in the ./configure

command tells the script what kind of

system architecture you have. To build

Endeavour on a Macintosh you would

need ./configure LinuxBigEndian in-

stead. Make sure you have the gtk , glib ,

imlib libraries, and the corresponding

developer packages, which are typically

identifiable by the -devel or -dev suffix

that most distributions add to the pack-

age’s filenames.

Refer to Table 1 for optional applica-

tions that often accompany Endeavour.

The helper pro-

grams listed in the

table provide more

functionality for

the user, although

All Roads Lead to Rome

The easiest way to install the Endeavour

file manager is to download an rpm from

the project homepage. If your distro does

not use rpms, you will have to build a

version from the source code. To do so,

download the bzip2 or gzip compressed

source code archive from the Endeavour

homepage, and unzip the archive by

Table 1: Optional applications

Package

minimum Version

Short Description

e2fsprogs

1.34

checks ext2 file systems

format [2]

0.3.0

formats floppies

tar

1.13

creates tar archives

gzip

1.2.4a

zips and unzips gzip formatted files

bzip2

1.0.2

zips and unzips bzip2 formatted files

zip

2.3

creates zip archives

unzip

5.50

unzips zip archives

lha

1.15

unpacks lha archives

rar

3.0.0

unpacks rar archives

wget

1.8.2

download tool

Figure 1: The Endeavour file manager window.

November 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

Managing and Archiving Files with Endeavour Mark II

Endeavour Mark II

LINUX USER

Figure 2: Endeavour moves deleted files to the recycle bin.

you can select View | Location Bar in the

menu to toggle the bar on and off. The

menu also has functions for the other

bars; the Status Bar , at the bottom of the

window, the Location Bar , and the Tool

Bar with a selection of useful tools, are

all displayed by default. Endeavour uses

the status bar to tell you the number of

entries in the current directory or the

size of the current file selection. The lock

icon on the left of the status bar allows

you to toggle between write-protected

and non-write-protected mode. Deleting

and renaming is disabled in write-pro-

tected mode.

The second icon specifies what hap-

pens when you delete a file. If

Endeavour has a recycle bin icon, any

files you delete are sent to the Endeavour

recycle bin in ~/.endeavour2/recycled .

To r estore the files in the bin, or to send

them off to the happy hunting grounds,

click the recycle bin icon ( RecBin ) in the

tool bar to open the Endeavour bin (Fig-

ure 2). Then click the Recover button to

restore deleted files or Purge to trash the

files. If you happen to be spring clean-

ing, Purge All will empty the whole bin

at one fell swoop.

To delete files without a detour via the

recycle bin, click the bin icon in the sta-

tus bar. The recycle bin icon now

becomes a shred-

der symbol. In

shredder mode,

Endeavour will de-

lete files without

prompting you to

confirm.

Selecting View |

Find Bar pops up

the find bar, an

extremely useful

feature that sup-

ports name-based

file and directory

searches. But that

is not all; you can select Object Content

in the Find drop-down to tell Endeavour

to search the file content.

Selecting View | Mount Bar displays

another useful tool bar, which you can

use to mount any drives listed in your

/etc/fstab/ . This feature did not work as

expected on our lab machine, but some

manual editing in Device | Devices ...

quickly solved the problem. To edit a

storage device, you first select the device

in the list and then select Edit to pop up

a dialog box where you can type the

appropriate mount command. Figure 3

shows the correct settings for a CD

writer on SuSE Linux.

After completing these changes, we

were able to mount the drive via

the mount bar. Unfortunately,

Endeavour failed to detect the CD

writer’s current status, attempting

to mount a disk when we had

actually told it to unmount.

Figure 4: The Options dialog adapts Endeavour to your requirements.

instead of iv . Of course you need to tell

Endeavor which viewer that is by click-

ing on Settings|Options to pop up the

configuration dialog shown in Figure 4.

You can use the Programs tab to intro-

duce Endeavour to the new default

viewer. Just type the application name in

the Default Viewer box. less could be a

useful choice; you would need to add the

xterm -e less command in this case. The

xterm is mandatory, as less needs to run

in a terminal window. Although less will

happily show you the binary characters

in a PNG graphic, you might find an

image viewer more useful if you will pri-

marily be viewing image files with the

viewer. In that case, you can select dis-

play , a tool from the ImageMagick

package, as your default viewer. Endeav-

our uses MIME types to identify various

file types. View | MIME Types will take

you to the configuration window shown

in Figure 5.

Figure 3: Endeavour needed some help with storage

devices.

Tuning Endeavour

In the default configuration, dou-

ble clicking a file will typically

give you an error message saying

that Endeavour was unable to

locate /usr/bin/iv . This is no sur-

prise as most distros do not

include the iv viewer [3]. Your

options are to install the tool or

modify the file manager configura-

tion to use your favorite viewer

Figure 5: Defining MIME types.

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LINUX USER

Endeavour Mark II

Figure 6: These settings define an OpenOffice

MIME type.

For example, to tell Endeavour to open

a file with the .sxw extension in OpenOf-

fice, you need to click Add to define a

new MIME type. In the dialog box that

then appears, specify File (for a normal

file) as the Class . Then specify applica-

tion/openoffice as the Type , and type the

filename extension for this MIME type in

the Extensions box. This is .sxw in our

example. You can optionally add a

Description .

All you are missing now is the com-

mand you want Endeavour to run when

you double click a .sxw file. First, specify

Command for the Handle By option, and

click the plus button to add the program

to the list of commands. Then double

click the pen and paper icon to type a

name for the action, and add the appro-

priate command; this is /opt/OpenOffice.

org/program/soffice in our example

(Figure 6). For more information on

Endeavour and MIME types surf to [4].

Despite defining a MIME type, you will

notice that double clicking a file still

calls the default viewer. The only way to

Figure 8: The integrated image browser in Endeavour.

change this behavior is to remove the

entry for the default viewer, if you have

one. Of course, if you opt for this

workaround, you will have to put in a lot

of work defining MIME types for com-

mon file types.

This menu has more Endeavour good-

ies, such as an image viewing and

browsing tool (Figure 8). Endeavour dis-

plays the image files in a directory as

thumbnails, displaying the selected

image in the right-hand panel, and scal-

ing large images to fit in the window. To

restore the image to its original size,

select Zoom 1:1 in the context menu for

the right-hand panel. The viewer also

has simple image manipulation features

such as rotation and mirroring, which

you can access via the Rotate | Transform

sub-menu.

If you are prepared to put some effort

into setting up Endeavour, your reward

will be a small-footprint, flexible file

manager that can help you with your

daily work. The tools can save you a lot

of time searching for add-ons, although

the file manager would benefit from

smoother integration of these extras.

More Features?

Besides traditional file management

tasks, Endeavour can also handle

archives. To do so, Endeavour calls tools

such as tar , zip , and lha . You need to

specify the paths to these tools in the

Options tab. Some Linux users will need

to modify the paths to bzip2 and bunzip2

for example: Endeavour expects these

tools in /bin/ , but Mandrake and Red Hat

Linux place them in

/usr/bin/ .

Endeavour uses a

different approach to

archiving than other

file managers. You

cannot call the archiv-

ing tools by right

clicking a file and

selecting an entry in

the context menu;

instead you need to

launch the required

archiver explicitly via

the Window | New

Archiver menu (see

Figure 7).

■

INFO

Figure 7: Endeavour can handle archive files.

[1] Endeavour Mark II:

http://wolfpack.twu.net/Endeavour2/

[2] Format: http://www.roland-riegel.de/

format/index.html?lang=en

[3] Image Viewer:

http://wolfpack.twu.net/IV/

[4] Endeavour and MIME types:

http://wolfpack.twu.net/Endeavour2/

help/mime_types.html

November 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

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