Contridentuallity

I got to know Filezilla from using it on Windows a while ago for the first time. The first impressions were great...and they remained that way as I was using it with time. I mean...a free, opensouce FTP application with all the features you could possibly need.

When I moved over to Linux, I was looking for something similar, but could hardly find anything of the same quality. There was gFTP and other similar, opensource applications, but none of them really did what they were supposed to...or atleast what we'd expect them to.

FireFTP has always been a great alternative, but it's not really that great running an FTP application in your browser if it slows the browser down, etc... In fact, I'm using Opera most of the time and wouldn't want to open FireFox just to FTP some files.

After a huge amount of "whining" from different users, communities, fans, etc... the Filezilla development team announced that they will be working on a version for Linux. And so they did...uhm...are!!! This is great. It's not just a port of the Windows application...it's a completely new interface, etc...

Installing FileZilla3 Beta on Linux (Fedora)

Ok...let's go over the installation procedure of FileZilla3 beta on your Linux box. The Windows installation is probably straight forward...double click the '.exe' file and you're set. Sounds better, right? Not exactly...since you have so much more control over your system in Linux.

Start off by downloading the '.tar.bz2' file.
Filezilla3 Beta Download

Once you've downloaded it, you'll need to extract the file to your computer. I prefer to install applications like these to my "/opt" directory. The choice is yours though.

Become root

su -

Then change the current directory to the folder where you downloaded the '.tar.bz2' file. In the example command below, it shows that I downloaded the file to my desktop and my username is "contrid"

cd /home/contrid/Desktop

Now extract the file. In the command below, I extract the file to my "/opt" directory, which will create a new folder named "FileZilla3" inside of the "opt" directory.

tar xvfj FileZilla3.tar.bz2 -C /opt

(if it was a '.tar.gz' file you would've changed the "xvfj" to "xvfz")

The installation is done. Let's create a symbolic link so that you can simply type "filezilla" in your terminal to launch the application.

ln -s /opt/FileZilla3/bin/filezilla /usr/bin/filezilla

Note : If you get some "libexpat" error when executing the "filezilla" command from the terminal, run the following command below

ln -sf /lib/libexpat.so.{0,1}

That's it!!!
Whenever you want to run FileZilla...simply type "filezilla" into your terminal and you're ready to go. If you have any questions, suggestions or improvements on this guide, please feel free to comment.