We’ve all used, or at least heard of, services like Dropbox, Ubuntu
One and Box, which allow us to store and sync our data in the cloud.
This usually involves uploading our data to their servers (and
purchasing more space, if we need to). It also comes with advantages
like availability of our data from anywhere, and the ability to
live-stream our media files when needed. But what if I tell you there is
a cheaper and more privacy-oriented solution available, which offers
similar features, and is also open source?
Yes, that’s ownCloud
we’re talking about. You can deploy ownCloud on your own server on a
LAMP stack, or buy some cheap Web space and store your files. That is
definitely cheaper than what most solutions provide. If it’s only local
intranet access that you want for sharing your files, look no further,
because this is an ideal solution for that purpose.
The advantages
of having ownCloud on your own server, instead of using services like
Dropbox, is that you’ll have more of a say about what you can store, and
how much you can store. You are only limited by the amount of space you
have left on your hard disk! What’s more, you are responsible for your
own data, so there are no privacy concerns about where/how your data is
stored, and whether it is safe — somewhat like the Diaspora project in
social networking.
What’s new in ownCloud 3.0?
With the
ownCloud application in active development, quite a few new features are
available in the latest stable version. The use of open standards and
protocols like webDAV, calDAV and cardDAV allows for the cross-platform
availability of synchronisation without any problems. The text editor
and photo gallery are features that no other vendors provide. The PDF
reader is an added bonus, and makes reading ebooks and other documents
easier.
The calendar application makes more sense now that
recurring events are available. You can now also install third-party
applications for extended functionality within the Web application.
Overall, when you compare this to the older versions, you’ll see that
the team has put in a lot of hard work.
Installation
Before going in for an install, you might want to check out the demo installation available online at demo.owncloud.org. It will give you a fair idea of what you are in for.
Installing ownCloud involves either getting it from your distribution’s repository, or downloading it from from the project website
and installing it manually, along with dependencies. The version
available in the repositories is likely to be very old, so I suggest you
try installing it yourself.
For our discussion, we’ll be
installing ownCloud 3, to get a taste of all those new features. The
required dependencies can be installed in Ubuntu as follows:
sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-json php5-gd php5-zip php5-mbstring php5-xml |
In
case of other distributions, you can figure out the equivalent commands
and packages. Also, these optional packages can be installed, depending
on your choice of environment:
sudo apt-get install mp3info curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl zip php5-sqlite |
Basically,
ownCloud supports mySQL or SQLite as the backend database, so keep that
in mind while installing the packages and database. Now that all
dependencies are in place, we can download ownCloud from the site or
from its Git repository; extract it, copy it to Apache’s Web root
directory, and set the permissions, as follows:
tar xvfz owncloud-master.tar.gzsudo cp -r owncloud /var/wwwcd /var/www sudo chown -R www-data : www-data owncloud |
Assuming you have Apache properly configured, you can go to the deployed location via a browser, like
http://localhost/owncloud.
You will be asked (Figure 1) to set up your admin username and
password, and you’re done! However, if you’re using MySQL for the
database, you will also need to enter those details (database username,
password etc). You might also want to change the default data storage
directory.
Figure 1: The install configuration page
Alternatively,
if you want to upgrade from ownCloud version 2 to 3, you simply have to
replace all files, except the custom configuration and your data. As
for version 1, unfortunately there is no way to upgrade from it, and you
will have to do a fresh installation from scratch.
A walk-through
The
Web interface (Figure 2) is rather simple, with a list of files in the
centre, and tabs to various applications like the file browser, music
player, calendar, contacts, gallery, etc, at the left. At the bottom
left corner is the Settings button, which reveals further options when
clicked (Figure 7).
- Figure 3: The music player
- Figure 4: The contacts application
- Figure 5: The calendar application
- Figure 6: The photo gallery
- Figure 7: The personal settings page
- Figure 8: The text editor
Clicking
each file either allows you to download it, or opens it in the text
editor if it is a simple text file. There are also various sharing
options, allowing you to share files among users and user groups.
The
text editor (Figure 8) is quite well developed, and has features like
syntax highlighting and code folding. We can even read PDFs with the
help of the integrated PDF viewer, which does not require any plugins to
be installed on the client system (thanks to
pdf-js). The
music player (Figure 3) allows you to stream music that has been
uploaded to the ownCloud server. It can play MP3 files, and show you
basic tag information stored in the ID3 tags — no fancy features here.
The
calendar and contacts applications (Figures 4 and 5) are very
impressive, with both providing calDAV and cardDAV synchronisation for
applications like Thunderbird, Evolution, etc. The calendar application
also allows for recurring events and all-day events like birthdays, etc.
You can set up multiple calendars and address books, with each having
their own calDAV/cardDAV link, so that these can be synchronised
independently.
The latest feature in ownCloud 3 is the photo
gallery application (Figure 6), which includes automatic album creation
and album covers. The photo viewer, too, is very beautiful and simple.
An annoying feature, though, is that an album and thumbnails in the
gallery remain there even if the associated files have been deleted from
the server. There is also an option to install third-party applications
from the Apps tab under the Settings menu. There are not too many
applications as of now, but let’s hope for a better future!
Here are some more features and tweaks that you may find useful.
Increasing the maximum upload file size
An
irritation with the ownCloud Web interface is that, by default, it does
not allow for files greater than 2 MB to be uploaded to the server. To
increase this limit, we have to edit the
php.ini file (usually located at /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) and change the value of upload_max_filesize and post_max_size parameters to the value we want. After saving the file, restart Apache to see your changes take effect!Syncing files with webDAV
ownCloud
allows for file synchronisation with the help of the webDAV protocol.
This is an open standard that works with almost any platform, including
Linux, Windows, Mac and even mobile platforms like Android, etc. To set
up webDAV in Nautilus, go to File –> Connect to server, and select webDAV as the connection type. Type in details like the server location, files, username, password, etc, and you’re good to go.
These details will usually be available from the personal section under the Settings
menu in the Web interface. A major bug that I stumbled on was that
webDAV reports incorrect information related to the free space left on
the server, and that we are able to upload files, ignoring the warning.
Alternatively, you can try setting up webDAV with the help of the
davfs package, as described on the project documentation.Music streaming with Ampache server
ownCloud can stream music to any desktop player that supports the
ampache protocol, like Amarok, Tomahawk, etc. We can use Banshee to stream music with the help of the banshee-extension-ampache
package, which needs to be installed separately. Just enter the Ampache
media link shown on the personal settings page, along with your
ownCloud login details in your player’s settings, and you’ll be
streaming music in no time.The verdict
Using ownCloud is
an altogether different experience, compared to other services like
Dropbox. I must say no other service will ever provide such a wide array
of features like music streaming, online editing, photo galleries, etc.
It does seem like a very good choice if you want to get a taste of the
cloud, and set up media streaming within your own local intranet, or on a
Web server, without any storage restrictions.
Overall, the
software has a good feel to it, and is in active development, though the
current release does have a few bugs here and there. Also, the
documentation needs a lot of work, in order to attract new users. The
next release is proposed to be out in the next two to three months. Some
of the features you should be looking forward to are encryption,
editing of complex document formats like
.odt and .doc, a native desktop, smartphone (Android) synchronisation applications, and many more you haven’t even thought of!
No comments:
Post a Comment