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Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Manuel Ricart
ISBN: 078971826x
Publication Date: 12/22/98

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FTP

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a protocol used to move files between computers. FTP under KDE is very simple: To go to a site, just enter an FTP URL in the location bar of a KFM window, like this:

ftp://somehost.somedomain.com

Somehost.somedomain.com is the fully qualified name of the machine you want to connect to. If that machine supports anonymous FTP, connections for which you don’t need a login and password, KFM will display the contents available at that location. To navigate, use KFM as if it was your local hard disk. You can copy files between your local machine and the server or from the server to your local machine by dragging and dropping files between KFM windows (see the next figure).


To FTP a file using KFM, type the URL for the FTP site and browse for the file you want. Then click and drag the file to your desktop or to another KFM window focused to your local computer.

Because some files you transfer will be large, the speed of the copy will be much slower than you normally experience. But don’t despair— the file will be transmitted across the wire.

If the server doesn’t allow anonymous connections, you’ll need to specify your login name, like this:

ftp://user@somehost.somedomain.com

user is your user name, followed by an at symbol (@), then followed by the fully qualified name of the machine. When you enter FTP URLs like this, more advanced programs raise a panel that asks you for your password.

You can also enter your password right in the URL; however, I don’t recommend that you do this, as the password might be displayed for other people to see in the URL. KFM removes the password from the URL when you have connected. To supply your password on the URL, enter it like this:

ftp://user:password@somehost.somedomain.com

The username and password are separated by a colon (:), like this:

ftp://me:mypassword@ftp.netscape.com

The same technique for accessing files using FTP can be used with a browser such as Netscape Navigator. To access the site, enter the URL, and you are delivered. Instead of clicking and dragging to move files across the network, just right-click on the link and choose the Save Link As[el] command from the context-sensitive menu that is displayed. Use the Save panel that is displayed to navigate your way to the location where you want to save the file.

Email

KDE provides an email program called kmail that you can use to read and write email messages. Although this program gets the job done, I am a little partial toward Netscape Messenger, as it provides more features than kmail. One nice feature of kmail over Netscape Messenger, however, is that kmail can manage multiple email accounts for you. Netscape allows you to set up multiple remote IMAP mailboxes but only a single POP mail account. Most users have several POP mailboxes. IMAP, though more powerful and useful to power users, is not as popular between ISPs. I also like having a spell-checker accessible right from the application, as Netscape Messenger offers. At the time of this writing, kmail doesn’t allow me to spell-check my messages. In this section, you will learn how to set up Netscape Messenger to handle your email.


Techno Talk:  POP and IMAP? What’s that?"
IMAP and POP are two different protocols used to access your email.

IMAP stands for Interactive Message Access Protocol. It allows you to manipulate and organize a remote mailbox as if it were local to your computer—and it does it without the need to transfer your entire mailbox to your computer. This is cool because your mailbox is then centralized on the network. No matter what computer you use and where you are, your entire mailbox is accessible. Many ISPs don’t like giving IMAP mailboxes, because users tend to collect copious amounts of email. For example, yours truly has an 80MB mailbox—yeah, there are things I should delete. But then again, disk space is cheap.

POP, which stands for Post Office Protocol, is a much simpler interface to your mailbox. It doesn’t allow you to organize your inbox in any way, but it allows you to download your messages to a local mailbox for reading.


The process of setting up your email reader is very similar for most email applications. You will need to know the following:

  Your email address
  The type of email account that you have (IMAP or POP)
  The username and password needed to access your account
  The name of the machine where your incoming mail is stored
  The name for the SMTP (outgoing) mail server


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