Tuesday, July 07, 2009

UbuntuOne -- got my invite

Yes, today I received an invitation to try out UbuntuOne which helps you store, sync and share your files across any number of your computers.
You get 2 GB of free storage or you can pay US$10 (about €7) per month to get 10 GB of storage.
Of course, this is not a new concept but I'd feel lot more confident entrusting my files to Ubuntu than to some startup that might not be around when I want to retrieve my stuff (that 1 TB of free storage from Oosah sure sounded great until they went belly up).
Installation seems very straightforward. However, I couldn't get the ubuntuone-client-gnome package to install in Opera 10. Although the PPA install was fine clicking on the Install button just did nothing in Opera.
The proceedure suggests using Synaptic to install this package for "non-Firefox" browsers but it did not show up in my Synaptic on two different computers.
However, it installed without problem in Firefox (3.0.11).
Nevertheless, getting it to start from in Firefox wasn't that easy in that hitting the UbuntuOne button in Applications>>Internet didn't seem to do anything. However, running "ps -e" in a terminal did indeed show that the client was running. I just couldn't access it.
This article and this one too describes a bug that may be involved. They do say that the bug will be squashed very soon, perhaps tomorrow.
So, to get the UbuntuOne webpage to open I had to kill it (kill "process number") and then run this command from a terminal:

ubuntuone-client-applet --signup

Once opened I could add my computer (MacBook with Ubuntu 9.04) to the list of included computers. Then I went ahead and uploaded some stuff. Absolutely no problems.
I later installed UbuntuOne on my EeePC 901 (Ubuntu 9.04) and was easily able to access and download the files I had uploaded on the Mac.
Ironically, UbuntuOne is easy to open and work with in Opera 10 so it seems it just can't be installed in this browser.
All-in-all, this looks a very nice tool that has the mark of reliability being from Ubuntu.
[Edit: I've been using UbuntuOne for a few days now and really like it. Haven't seen any serious problems although it'd be nice to have an upload progress bar. Great stuff, I'll certainly be using this]

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