I have multiple computers in my house that run various versions of Linux Mint or Ubuntu, though soon they will all be running the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ("Focal Fossa").

At the moment, if I want to move files between computers, I either put the relevant files onto a "thumb" / flash drive (for sensitive or large files) or I e-mail them to myself (for non-sensitive or small files)... Regardless of how I currently send / receive files though, it is a lot of mucking around.

What I would like to do - preferably using something with a graphical front-end (though I am not entirely opposed to a Terminal solution, if it's not too much mucking around) - is send / receive files between each computer wirelessly, over our wireless network...

Can anyone recommend a program which will allow me to do this?

Install the OpenSSH-server package on the machine(s) you wish to send files to.

Then on the machine(s) you wish to use the graphics on, start up your graphical file manager. That would be Nautilus or Thunar or PCManFM or similar:

• Nautilus: Other Locations -> sftp://gregory@192.168.1.102/home/gregory/Documents/
• Thunar: Go -> Open Location -> sftp://gregory@192.168.1.102/home/gregory/Documents/
• PCManFM: Go -> Connect to Server -> type: SSH; host: 192.168.1.102; Log in as: gregory; path: /home/gregory/Documents/

Swap out the user name and IP addresses above.

You can use keys with those. As far as I am aware they also work with the settings from ssh_config.

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An alternative would be shared drive space that can be used by by all machines on the LAN simultaneously. NFS is recommended for pure Linux local network situations.

Interestingly, I could not get this to work Linux Mint-->Linux Mint (it just kept timing-out every time), but I could get it to work Linux Mint-->Ubuntu using the same steps; in fact it not only worked flawlessly Linux Mint-->Ubuntu, but it did so the very first time.

Of course, next week all my computers will be going back to Ubuntu, so hopefully it works just as seamlessly under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because this solution was exactly what I need to solve my problem.


Thanks!

Great that it is useful for the task. It should behave the same for all machines, if you have OpenSSH-server installed on each machine that you expect to connect to.

Maybe Linux Mint has a firewall installed? If so, you'd need to open port 22 for incoming TCP connections. That is the default port for SSH/SFTP.

Meh... I don't care too much - less than a week from now, the machine will be wiped and "clean installed" with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.


If I still have the problem then - which I am not expecting - then I'll look further into it...

I use scp from the command line. It's a file transfer brother of ssh. Here's a tutorial: https://www.garron.me/en/articles/scp.html#examples

If you are looking to sync with a directory that already has some matching files in it and don't want to overwrite those files (and waste time in the process), rsync with the "-a" (for "archive") argument is the tool of choice. https://www.digitalocean.com/communi...ories-on-a-vps

See the commands' respective man pages for more.

There was a bit of a learning curve, but learning how to use those two commands made my Linux life much more productive in the long run.