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Kushal Das edited this page Mar 31, 2020 · 23 revisions

Welcome to the manualbox wiki!

Installation guide on Mac

First install latest osxfuse following their guidelines. Remember to install the Macfuse Compatibility layer too.

Install osxfuse

Then download, and install the app from the DMG file.

You can verify the shasum in Mac using the following command in the terminal.

shasum -a 256 ManualBox.dmg

Below is a list of all release files and their sha256sums.

  • 635d0a46f22b12846170b1827fcf90ba47b9bcf132179069887d394a96235c4e v0.2.1
  • ab5750846795c5aca06752125799c84cf9675610beda788f9bc7405c4570c3d6 v0.2.0
  • 458c1aa5177c75592a7c89fe6345077b3fe41a5701f90444cd2d4898bc2ac04e v0.1.0

Installation guide on Linux

For now, please use from the source (we will be building and providing packages soon).

git clone https://github.com/kushaldas/manualbox.git
cd manualbox

On Fedora

sudo dnf install python3-cryptography python3-qt5 python3-fusepy python3-psutil fuse -y

On Debian

sudo apt install python3-cryptography python3-pyqt5 python3-fusepy python3-psutil fuse

Also remember to check your /etc/fuse.conf to make sure that your normal user can mount/unmount FUSE filesystems, the following entry should be there (specially on Debian).

# Allow non-root users to specify the allow_other or allow_root mount options.
user_allow_other

Usage guide

To start the application from source:

On Linux:

./devscripts/manualbox

On Mac:

Click on the App icon like any other application.

If you are running the tool for the first time, it will create a new manualbox and mount it in ~/secured directory, it will also give the you the password, please store it somewhere securely, as you will need it to mount the filesystem from the next time.

initial screen

After selecting (or you can directly type) the mount path (must be an empty directory), you should type in the password, and then click on the Mount button.

File system mounted

Now, if you try to access any file, the tool will show a system notification, and you can either Allow or Deny via the following dialog.

Allow or deny access

Every time you allow a file access, you will also see the notification message via the system tray icon.

Accessing file msg

To exit the application, first click on the Unmount, and right click on the systray icon, and click on the Exit or close via window close button.

How to exit from the application

Notes to remember

While the filesystem is mounted, the data is on the RAM. Means you should not put big files into this tool (mounted filesystem). Try to keep secrets, password files, or configuration files with plaintext passwords into this tool.

Usage examples (think about your important dotfiles with passwords/tokens)

Note: remember to keep backups of any files used using this tool. As this is still beta software.

Note: If you open the mounted directory path from a GUI file browser, you will get too many notifications, as these browsers will open the file many times separately. Better to have you GUI application/command line tool to use those files as required.

Thunderbird

You can store your thuderbird profile into this tool. That way, thunderbird will ask for access when you start the application.

ls -l ~/.thunderbird/
# now find your right profile (most people have only one)
mv ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxx.default/logins.json ~/secured/
ln -s ~/secured/logins.json ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxx.default/logins.json

SSH private key

mv ~/.ssh/id_rsa ~/secured/
ln -s ~/secured/id_rsa ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Known issues

  • If you try open multiple instance of the application and then try to mount or unmount, it will cause wrong data inside of ~/.manualbox, also if you are trying to mount on the same path, the application will throw an error.
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