I realise purists would say "use the command-line" but this is the age of Ubuntu and since I spend most of my time behind a proxy server I find it easier to configure and use PuTTY on Windows than configure ssh with connect.c
I also realise PuTTY is available on Linux but it seems to use some weird GUI widget set that is rather nasty to use.
So, is there a nice GtK front-end for ssh that I could download and use on Linux in Gnome?
Any terminal will work. I personally use gnome-terminal but a lot of people like xterm. I normally just set up launchers in Gnome if I really want to keep an icon around for a connection.
Other than puTTY I haven't run across any sort of front end for storing SSH connection details.
This looks like a promising application: SSHMenu2 (via lifehacker).
You might also be interested in setting up remote key authentication for the servers you're frequently connecting to. This way you won't need to remember usernames and passwords for these servers and logins will be automatic. More info: http://www.debuntu.org/ssh-key-based-authentication
SSHMenu2 looks like what you're after, but another possibility is setting up an alias for the connection. For instance, in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases file add a line like:
alias sshconnection='ssh username@server'
but add all of the switches you require, like -L for forwarding ports, or -X if you need to forward X windows. This will require learning what the switches do, but you don't need to remember them each time anymore.
This is slightly tangential to your question but you might want to try sshfs. I mostly use it on my Mac but you can get it for Linux here. This will let you mount any remote system as a drive as long as you can ssh into it. So, if you keep files on different servers you can just mount them as drives -- and you don't need root permission. Then you can use all your favorite tools to work with those files -- editors, file managers, word processors, etc. -- as if there were local.
As far as a Gnome connection manager like putty, I honestly don't know of one. I do have a suggestion however, though it may seem a little unorthodox:
Are you familiar with Gnome-Do ? It's basically a Quicksilver clone for Gnome. There is an ssh plugin for Gnome-Do that looks like it will maintain a history of what hosts you have logged in to. It will also parse hosts you have stored in your ~/.ssh/config file.
As far as file transfer over ssh, Gnome has this capability built-in, which can be accessed from Places -> Connect to Server which will create a nice icon on your desktop similar to Mac OS. I also use gFtp.
Your best bet is probably HotSSH. It's pretty excellent, and the author is one of the nicest developers you'll ever run into. It's probably spawned off from the work the author did on Hotwire.
I still have some gnome-terminal launchers configured to log in to some remote host by setting the Custom Command in the Title and Command tab of the profile editor, that works well enough too.
"than configure ssh with connect.c" -> that sounds awful (if I understood you correctly) :(
Are you aware of the ~/.ssh/config file possibilities? You can configure any ssh options you need there and bind them to one word. For me that's much faster than launching gui.
Some examples from my file:
global config - with forwarding and keepalive:
Host *
ForwardAgent yes
TCPKeepAlive yes
SVN repository - no features, host available through 'svn ssh+svn://rsync/...'
Host rsync
User XXXXX
ForwardAgent no
TCPKeepAlive no
HostName ch-s011.rsync.net
Normal hosts - with default username:
Host nat
HostName nat-gw.YYY.net
Host behind nat, using a tunnel through the previous host
Host ZZZ
User some-other-user
HostName 192.168.0....
ProxyCommand ssh -T nat nc %h %p
That way I can have access to the usual hosts with no effort. My default shell host is always "ssh shell" and with public/private key setup, I don't use passwords at all. Try it - maybe you don't need gui at all.
Try "PAC Manager" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pacmanager/) for Gnome (Perl GTK).