Ubuntu – An alternative for Nautilus Actions in MATE DE

Update 2021-04-23

For the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal fossa) the below actions are not needed, the package filemanager-actions is located in universe pocket. See fresh answer.

Update 2018-05-31

Daniel Marynicz has created PPA for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with Nautilus, Caja and Nemo-enabled packages. You can install them as usual:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:daniel-marynicz/filemanager-actions

sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions-nautilus-extension # Nautilus
sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions-caja-extension # Caja
sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions-nemo-extension # Nemo

sudo apt-get install filemanager-actions* # simply all filemanagers

After installation you can launch fma-config-tool.

Initial consideration of the problem:

Modern version of Nautilus Actions (nautilus-actions package in trusty (14.04 LTS), xenial (16.04 LTS), artful (17.10)) are named as FileManager Actions (filemanager-actions package, it is not yet packaged in Debian and Ubuntu - see at repology.org).

If you do not want to compile packages by yourself - use links in the end of this answer.

So we can try to compile this package locally:

1. Install dependencies

    sudo apt-get install build-essential gnome-doc-utils intltool \
    libnautilus-extension-dev uuid-dev libxml2-dev libgtop2-dev rarian-compat
   

   Note: if you need to support all three file-managers you should install two additional packages before compilation with sudo apt-get install libnemo-extension-dev libcaja-extension-dev.

2. Download, extract, configure, make (otherwise, if you prefer the easy way: use the deb file from links at the end of answer)

    cd ~/Downloads
    wget https://download.gnome.org/sources/filemanager-actions/3.4/filemanager-actions-3.4.tar.xz
    tar -xf filemanager-actions-3.4.tar.xz
    cd filemanager-actions-3.4
    ./configure
    make -j5
   

3. Install package

   • Here standard way is to use

        sudo make install
     

     but this will not create deb-package (but you can remove fma with sudo make uninstall);

   • so using checkinstall is better:

        sudo apt-get install checkinstall
        sudo checkinstall make install
        sudo apt-get install ./filemanager-actions_3.4-1_amd64.deb
     

After installation you will get new executable named fma-config-tool, its window is named FileManager-Actions Configuration Tool and looks like:

Below is the link to compiled package:

• only Nautilus support - download filemanager-actions_3.4-1_amd64.deb-package.

To create password protected archive in Caja file-manager one should:

1. Open Caja file manager

2. Make right click on the folder to arhive

   

3. New window named Compress will open

   

4. Click on Other Options and select password capable archive type in the right part of Filename (such as default .zip, .7z, .cbz, .ear, .exe, .war) then enter password in Password field and click Create

   

5. The password protected archive is created.

Note: if Caja and its archiving functionality are not installed -
one can install them with sudo apt install caja engrampa. Here Engrampa is archive manager for MATE desktop (an analog for file-roller in GNOME).