I recently put Fedora Core 2 on my laptop and essentially have been re-learning everything that I took for granted on Windows. One of these things is connecting to FTP servers. I have been trying to find a good GUI ftp client for Linux and have come up with roadblock after roadblock. I can never seem to find anything that directly tells me the commands I need to do what I want with a command line client, which includes connecting to a server using SSL.

My most recent attempt was to get axyftp. Screenshots looked good, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Well, it wouldn't install, saying it couldn't find the needed GTK gui components, so I downloaded GTK+ 2.4.4 and tried to install that, but when I ./configure that, it ends by saying

checking for glib-2.0 >= 2.4.0 atk >= 1.0.1 pango >= 1.4.0... Package glib-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `glib-2.0.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'glib-2.0' found

I really need help. I would really prefer a GUI client, but essentially all I'm trying to do is log in to passworded FTP servers and download stuff from them. If anyone could either tell me how to install axyftp, or where to find a good tutorial on using something like the built-in ftp service in Fedora that would be awesome. I've tried connecting with ftp, and on a normal server without SSL I can do it, but whenever I try to do anything, it says it's Entering Passive Move and just hangs there. Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome to LQ!

You should probably install the glib2 package to make that FTP client work. If you tell us which distro you're using, we can probably help more with that.

On the command line stuff -- If you're getting errors entering passive mode, it's possible that your firewall isn't set up right. FTP is weird in that it uses two TCP connections to do its work, one for commands, and one for data. In old style FTP, the data connection was often opened from the server back to the client, but with firewalls these days, that doesn't work so well, hence passive mode. In passive mode you open the connection to some high numbered port of the remote FTP server -- you need to be sure that a firewall somewhere along the way isn't blocking this.

Depending on your type of install of Fedora you may find the gftp client installed. I've found this software to be more than suitable for ftp tasks. If you fancy command-line work then I recommend lftp, which offers some nice features. Already mentioned is the firewall situation, WRT ftp'ing, that should be looked at - especially if you can connect but cannot transfer files.

Best regards,