Episode: 196
Title: HPR0196: linux file managers
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0196/hpr0196.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 13:34:14

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Hello and welcome to another installment of Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Dave and I'll be your host for today and in today's installment of Hacker
Public Radio I want to talk to you about a couple or three different things.
The first one being how to plug a flat tire.
The second one being a rather hastily thrown together high-level opinionated showcase
of Linux file managers.
Another one being a brief mention of a really cool life's Linux CD.
And the last thing I want to talk about is a new, I don't want to use the word segment,
but I do hope that future Hacker Public Radio's correspondence may chime in on this,
but I would like to introduce what is in my bag segment of Hacker Public Radio more on that later.
I am not in my normal audio recording environment right now.
I am not using my normal audio recording setup right now.
I am in my wife Honda Accord and I am not using headphones.
And the reason for that is last night about, with about 40 minutes of daylight left,
I noticed that my driver's side tire on my Honda Civic front tire was about half flat.
And as flat tires often want to do, it was only flat on one side, that was sort of a joke.
Anyway, I only had like 40 minutes of daylight left and it was a Sunday night and I needed the car for work today.
So what I did was I took the tire off and took it in the backyard and got a hose pop,
as we call it here in South Carolina, to a lot of people, that is a water hose or a garden hose.
And I turned on the faucet or the spiket and used the hose pop to wet the tire under low pressure,
allowing the water to sheet over the surface of the tire as I inspected the tire for holes.
I was looking for a nail or a screw or anything like that sticking out of the tire and I was also looking for air bubbles.
Now, I think technically the correct way to do this is to submerge the tire in soapy water or to use soapy water in place of how I was doing it with this hose pop with regular water coming out.
It can be done the way I did it and I tried this for probably 20 minutes looking for air bubbles and foreign objects sticking out of the tire.
And I found none which was a dilemma because it was getting dark and I found no new hole in the tire.
This tire had been previously plugged by myself and that's probably where the tire was losing air.
I had my tires rotated the day before and I guess taking the tire off and the spinning motion may have loosened the plug.
Now, a plug is a temporary way of repairing a flat tire and I'm guilty of plugging tires and forgetting that I plug them and using them as a near permanent or in some cases permanent solution to the flat tire.
I have done this many times and in fact I cannot remember the last time I had a tire properly patched which is something that's nothing inside of the tire.
But in on with the topic I wasn't able to patch to excuse me plug the tire because I could find no hole and I was running out of daylight.
So what I did was put the tire back on and fill it back up with air and I checked it this morning hoping there was enough air pressure for me to get the work.
I bet there wasn't so I left the car park and I drove my wife's car to work as she had access to a state vehicle today.
She works for the state and I left the car for my retired father to fix for me.
I did make an effort and I have plugged tires before so I don't feel really guilty about asking my dad to fix it for me.
That beats me being late for work.
Anyway so if I could have found the hole what I would have done and probably the hole as I've already said was probably where it had been previously plugged before.
But let's assume for the sake of this installment of Packup by the Radio that there was a nail on the tire.
Step one is to remove the nail with a pair of needle nose pliers or something.
Step two which I guess the very first part of step two should have taken place before you had a flat tire which is to have purchased a tire plug kit.
These can be purchased at any Walmart for probably six or seven dollars and they consist of a rasp and an insertion tool.
And probably four or five plugs. Now plugs look like pop cleaners except they don't come in colors.
They come in one color black and they're very sticky and they are fatter than pop cleaners.
But they're probably four inches long and they're really tacky. I mean they've got an adhesive built into them.
I think some plugs come with cement that you can coat the plug lift but the ones I always buy already have the adhesive on them.
But step one is like I said to remove the foreign object.
Step two is to use the rasp which looks like a punch. This metal it's got to point it in and it's got to handle.
Usually a t-handle and it's a shaft or a cylinder and it's made out of metal.
And the surface of the shaft is bumpy or it's got a grit to it.
Like a really really really coarse sandpaper. I guess a better analogy would be is it's like a file surface of a metal file.
Anyway what you do with this is maybe counter intuitive but you stick it in the hole that was created when the nail went in your tire.
So you've removed the nail, you stick the rasp in that hole and rather rapidly in and out you insert and pull out the rasp several times.
And what this does is the file like surface cleans the hole and roughens up it.
Roughens up the surface or cleans it and allows for easier insertion of the plug.
Once you've done that use the insertion tool which is like a giant needle with a hole in it.
That's big enough to insert one of these plugs in.
These plugs are like I said about four inches long and two or three times a diameter of pop cleaners.
You just thread that in the hole and fold the ends up towards the handle.
So you stick it in half way and you fold the ends up and then you insert that into the newly cleaned out hole.
And you stick it in till there's about a half inch of plug left sticking out of the tire and then you pull it out rapidly.
So when you do that the plug stays in the hole.
I don't know about the half inch thing.
There should be about a half inch of plug protruding from the tire when you're doing so you thread the hole of the insertion tool with the plug.
You ram it down in the hole and you pull it out.
You ram it down almost till you can see no more plug and you pull it out real quick and the plug stays in there and you've got about a half inch of plug sticking out and you can trim that with a pair of scissors.
After you do this you should pump the tire back up, fill the tire back up with air and test it again with soapy water to see if there's any air bubbles.
And if that's the case, if there are none then you are successful and you can drive on the tire.
And as I said earlier it is a temporary solution but it's one that I have used permanently with some success.
Anyway, that's how you plug a tire.
I mentioned that only because it was on my mind and I figured that maybe people don't know how to plug tires.
Anyway, only with the next topic which is Linux related and I want to talk briefly about file managers.
And in particular the file managers I used and why I choose to use them.
The very first file manager I can ever remember using, I'm talking about graphical file managers now.
Under a Linux system was the ex file manager or exfm.
This is no longer being developed but it is still installable.
You can find it someplace on the internet I'm sure.
And it's a very simple graphical file manager reminiscent of the file manager that came with Windows 3.1.
There is a file manager as well as an application manager and it's just a box with some hot cons.
And you double click the file folder and it opens up and you end up simple enough.
That's the first one I ever remember using.
Of course there's no Linux command line which is a file manager but it's not graphical.
And it's the truest sense that the command line is it.
And as a general rule I tend to use the command line for file management purposes for quick and dirty jobs or for jobs I want to be automated in a crime job or a back script.
For everything else it's normal desktop use.
I tend to use a graphical file manager.
And the first graphical file manager I actually fell in love with was one called QKDesk.
Which is still being developed it uses the TK stands for tickle.
I think it's developed in a TCL language.
But it's TKDesk you can find it at tkdesk.sourceforge.net.
It is a pain file manager and it comes with an application bar.
You should check this out if you want to see an example of a really powerful pain tree view type file manager.
There's been around a long time and it's still pretty powerful as far as feature sets.
It was really pretty neat and the reason I think I fell in love with it is because it allowed you to work in not just two pains but you can have three or four pains open.
You can open up a new window.
It had a lot of flexibility.
I check that out.
I quit using tkdesk which by the way is very configurable.
When I found out about EMELF and I love that file manager say two pain file manager.
And you probably heard me talk about it before.
But that was that used to GTK 1.0 or 1.2 whatever it was to a kid.
And that fell out of being actively developed some time ago.
And with some amount of celebration, I was very happy when I found out a couple of years after EMELF FIM stopped being developed.
The EMELFM2 was being developed and you can find out more about it at EMELFM2.net.
Other file managers I use very briefly are DFM, PC Man FM, Midnight Commander which is a Hincursus-based file manager.
Did I mention PC Man FM?
I think I did which is like Nautilus is simply used as tabs.
That's a feature that Nautilus is supposed to be getting.
And Nautilus which is one I don't particularly like.
Not exactly sure why but I've just never taken the Nautilus.
And there's another one that they're called Gen2 and I'm called Worker.
And they all have different strengths.
Anyway, the one I use every day is EMELFM2.
And I'm a fluxbox user.
But there's another file manager that I also use every day.
Well, I left that rocks.
In my fluxbox menu, I have four or five file manager shortcuts in my root menu.
They are EMELFM2, PC Man FM, Midnight Commander, and Conqueror.
Conqueror's the one I want to talk about just a little bit.
And as a fluxbox user, I still find Conqueror to be a thing of beauty and an integral part of my desktop use.
I use it every day.
Now, all of these file managers, I'm pretty sure all of them will do what I need them to,
which is one thing I need them to do is allow me to manage files on remote systems via SSH.
And this is possible even with Midnight Commander, even from the command line or even from TKVS
and any of these old file managers using fuse.
And I think it's file system under user space, or I can get us able to use these things, or fuse and SSHFS.
And I'm not going to go into how to set that up, but it's not hard.
And I guess the main benefit of fuse and SSHFS is it allows one to set up system wide, a mount point for remotely managing files using SSH encryption.
Anyway, the reason I use Conqueror is because it has the fish protocol.
If I'm not mistaken, you don't need to fuse in SSHFS, or maybe you do.
There seems to be less overhead as far as setting them up.
Although I have that set up too, so there's a little bit of gray area there for me as to what's required to use Conqueror in this method.
But Conqueror has the fish KIO slave, so it's navigating to a remote directory via SSH.
And Conqueror is as easy as typing fish colon slash slash user at host colon directory.
And I like it a lot because I can have different tabs open.
I can bookmark those remote directories and just drag and drop in.
It's just drop dead simple.
It prompts you for a user name and password if necessary.
So if you have SSH set up already, this is the seamless integration with Conqueror.
So it's just really good stuff.
I did very little preparation.
This is probably evident for this installment of HackriPilot Radio.
But I did stumble upon something I'd never seen before, which is VIFM,
which is an in-person-based two-page file manager for the console that uses VI key bindings.
And you can find it at VIFM.Sourceforge.net.
I have not tried this yet, but it seems like a worthwhile project.
Anyway, that, like I said, is a very ill-prepared, high-level rushed Linux file manager talk.
Anyway, real quick.
Next, I wanted to mention a live CD that I recently tried.
I've talked about this in my podcast just briefly.
It's called SwiftHaz.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right.
S-L-I-T-A-Z.org is where you can find out more about it.
It is very lightweight.
It's smaller than damn small Linux.
It's smaller than puppy Linux.
It is small.
You can get it in several different ISOs.
One is less than 30 megabytes.
One is around 80 megabytes.
And you can get the stable version or the development version, which they call the cooking version.
I'm pretty sure the stable version uses Joe's Windows Manager.
I think it sort of stands for JWM.
And the cooking version is one I'm sort of excited about.
It uses open box, but it uses the LX panel, which is part of the lightweight X desktop environment, LXDE.
And it was the hands down best implementation, nicest looking open box desktop I've ever seen before.
It looked honestly with the LX panel and the way open box was configured.
It looked like I was looking at the XFCE desktop, as if it was faster, noticeably faster.
There are a lot of really innovative, unique features to SwiftHas that I've not tried out.
One of them allows you to boot SwiftHas off the web.
Check it out at SwiftHas.org.
I think this is a really cool lightweight Linux distribution that really shows the power and flexibility of Linux.
I'm at a stop sign, checking traffic.
And I've safely navigated that intersection.
I will continue with the last thing I want to talk about, which is what's in my bag.
Now, that's probably not the best name for it.
This could be what's in your pocket or what's in your car right now.
I mean, right now, driving home from work, I want to tell you about my geek gear that I have with me
in my computer bag and messenger bag.
Sitting beside me, I have a work laptop, which is a day old Inspiron, I think, is Windows XP.
It's the one that the workplace gave me to do work in.
Checking traffic, excuse me.
And I also have my Lenovo T61 laptop in the same bag, running Ubuntu Linux.
In addition to that, I am equipped currently in the car with me.
My Nokia N18.
And in my left hand, I am holding the Olympus LS10 digital horse recorder.
I'm recording this very podcast on it.
And honestly, completely honestly unprepared for this podcast.
I just thought of this idea last night.
It's pure coincidence.
But I also have with me a PowerMac G4 power PC computer.
It's sitting in the passenger side floorboard right now.
This was my Oscass server.
And I loaned it to my brother for a job he had to do with his company.
And he got through with it and he called me up today.
We met for lunch and he brought it back.
So I have it with me as well.
I don't normally carry that with me, but I have it with me right now.
I also have a Canon SD-1000 digital camera and a Motorola Razer phone,
as well as an audio G3 4GB MP3-slash-og-slash video player.
And also happened to have my fourth generation iPod photo,
running the very latest version of Fluxbox, excuse me, Rockbox version 3.0.
And I have four USB thumb drives, two SD cards and one 250 GB USB hard drive.
And a bunch of USB cables.
That's as far as electronics go.
I have some work folders and papers and formulas and stuff as well.
But in a couple of, I guess the last two or three issues of Linux Journal.
And that's it.
That's what I got in my bag.
So that's going to be it.
That's going to wrap up this hastily prepared hacker public radio.
I hope there was something interesting there for you.
And if not, listen tomorrow to another episode of hacker public radio,
where I'm sure there will be something more interesting than what I just talked about.
If you didn't find this interesting, why don't you do something about it
and record something yourself.
Hacker public radio is in need of correspondence.
Join in.
Don't just be a consumer, be a contributor.
Record something and send it to hacker public radio.
And be a part of the party.
Okay.
That's it.
And tune in tomorrow for another episode of hacker public radio.
Thank you for listening to hacker public radio.
HCR is sponsored by Carol.net.
So head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-C for all of those of you.
