This is part 6 of my series of posts about making Linux Mint my daily driver.

Last time we looked at A better way to use dnsmasq on Linux Mint, which turned out to have some annoyances related to it. This time we look at two more little conveniences I’ve recently implemented.

Some Windows stuff just works

A thing I used to use for work on my Windows setup was the MicroSIP VOIP client. It’s a light-weight SIP client that just works. Since it’s only available for Windows, I thought I should check out Linphone on my Linux Mint system, which turned out to be a tiny bit annoying to use purely because I’m so used to MicroSIP.

So I had this thought… I already have a PlayOnLinux (wine) setup for Mikrotik Winbox on my system, so why no try sticking MicroSIP in there too? It turned out to be pretty easy.

Firstly, I created a directory ~/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/Winbox/drive_c/microsip and copied my MicroSIP files from the C:\microsip folder of a backup of my old Windows C: drive into it.

Next, I went into PlayOnLinux and hit the Configure button, selected the Winbox virtual drive on the left and clicked “Make a new shortcut from this virtual drive” to add MicroSIP as a shortcut in PlayOnLinux and on my desktop.

From there, I launched MicroSIP and it Just Worked (TM).

Accessing SFTP servers is a breeze

We all have to transfer files to and from remote machines quite often, for example I often need to move files between my laptop and my Minecraft server for stuff like world trimming with MCA Selector. If SFTP is available as an option, especially with SSH key authentication, this is always my go-to method of copying files around.

On Linux Mint we have a couple of choices when it comes to SFTP clients that are included in the default operating install.

• We have the command line tool sftp that comes with OpenSSH, obviously.
• We also have the ability to add SFTP servers to Remmina.
• And because I’m an old guy prone to nostalgia I have Midnight Commander on my system, which also does SFTP.

But… My favourite is the default file manager in Cinnamon, called Nemo. Simply open Nemo, press Ctrl-L (location) and type in the SFTP URL of your server, so say I need to connect to account sftpuser on a server called mysftp.example.com I would just enter sftp://[email protected] as the location. If key authentication is available, and the right key is loaded into ssh-agent it will just connect, if not it will just ask for a password. If that SFTP server listens on a non-standard port (say 1234) it would just be sftp://[email protected]:1234 instead.

This works for almost any machine you have SSH access to as well, for example I don’t specifically have an SFTP server on my Minecraft server, SFTP support is just built in to the SSH server.

Once you have your connection open, you can add it as a bookmark in Nemo so it’s easy to get back to next time you need to access that SFTP server.

Let’s see Windows or MacOS users do that… muahahaha.