Archive for November 13th, 2010

filezilla a good substitute for the buggy gftp Gnome FTP client on Linux

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

filezilla logo picture

As a Linux user until just recently, I’ve always used either the ftp console comamnd or lftp or ncftp etc.

I have also used the gftp as a graphic FTP client to transfer some files in the far past, and even then my memories on how it behaves are painful 🙂

The gftp used to be so buggy that it crashed quite often during simple file transfers or directory listing, I thought with the years to pass the things has changed, but unfortunately my hopes were for nothing.

Just recently I tried the gftp on my Gnome desktop to transfer some files to a remote FTP server just to realize once again how buggy and slow this software is.

During some operations (which I cannot really recall the gftp (gnome ftp) client crashed). Also file listings were so slow that it usually took a couple of seconds to refresh a file directory tree.

The only thing that I have noticed as a bit different than as I remember the gftp is that it included much more configuration options and a very handy feature of adding an FTP bookmark
That’s very useful since you can easily bookmark an ftp host with it’s user and password saved, so later you can just press the host and you’re conntected again (e.g. you don’t need to remember the FTP server credentials :))

Even though the improvements in gftp I wasn’t very happy of it’s buggy behaviour so after thinking about some alternatives for a graphical FTP client I remembered there used to be a project long time ago called filezilla aiming at creating an advanded FTP client to be embedded into the Mozilla browser.

A quick apt-cache search filezilla proved the filezilla package is available for my Debian Testing Linux.
So I’ve installed filezilla using a straightforward:

debian:~# apt-get install filezilla

After launching the software and testing it with my FTP all problems were gone, FTP transfers were quicker than with gftp, no random crashes plus a very quick load up and listing of the remote server FTP directories.

So if you my dear reader are looking for a decent FTP graphical client for Gnome desktop on GNU/Linux then filezilla is the one I strongly recommend you.

Filezilla just works like a charm 🙂