Page 1 of 2How to create your own cloud with Linux
Ulteo OVD can share both Linux and Windows apps inside a browser
We've
prodded cloud computing from a technical point of view several times
but, from a user's perspective, it's a lot more than your
always-available hard drive on the internet. It's omnipresent across
platforms and, with the proliferation of smartphones, even devices.
Apple created a lot of buzz when it announced its iCloud service earlier this year. It's designed to enable users to store content so it's accessible from all of their devices.
Guess
what? With Linux you can do it better. In the following article we'll
show you how to harness the power of the cloud to access all types of
data stored on remote services on your devices - from Chrome on your
office laptop running Ubuntu, to Firefox on your Fedora desktop at home,
to your Android mobile phone.
And while Apple's iCloud is
limited, in that it's for users of Apple's products, we'll look at
services that cater for all the three major desktops, namely Linux,
Windows and Mac OS X.
In the true spirit of open source, we'll
also look at options that let you create your own cloud to share
pictures with friends and family, stream music to your devices or keep
your calendars in sync, whether you modified them in the office or at
home.
At the end of it all, you'll be able to sync bookmarks and
carry your browser passwords from your netbook at home, to the laptop in
your office, to a lunch meeting on your Android phone. We'll show you
how you can send and receive email on any device from all your accounts,
whether on a webmail service or hosted on your own server, and always
have your calendars and contacts with you.
We'll also cover tools
that enable you to take pictures with your Android phone and instantly
share them on a website such as Flickr, or a social network like
Facebook, or upload them to your own cloud. We'll even show you how to
buy music from your Linux desktop and stream it onto your mobile phone.
That's how you make cloud computing work for you.
Applications
Strip
away the buzz about cloud computing and all you've got is a web
application that gives you the look and feel of a native desktop app,
but runs inside a browser and is hosted on a remote web server halfway
around the world.
At the expense of some features, you get the
ability to access all your documents created with the web app from any
device across the planet. This has paved the way for low-cost netbooks
with just enough juice to run stripped-down versions of operating
systems to access these apps.
Desktops in the sky
You
can run web applications from their own interfaces, but for a more
familiar way of working, there are several options that let you assemble
them inside a browser-based virtual desktop.
Jolicloud runs
inside any web browser on any platform and lets you add or remove any
number of web apps to the desktop. It's integrated with online storage
services such as Dropbox, which means you can access your web app files
wherever you are.
Another way to use Jolicloud is to install
JoliOS on an older computer or netbook. This enables you to also add and
access some platform apps, such as the media player VLC. Since your
apps are associated with your online account, when you log in to
Jolicloud, either from the web interface or from JoliOS, it will
automatically sync your apps across installations.
Peppermint OS,
which uses ICE, is a site-specific browser based on Chromium, which
also makes web apps feel more like their desktop brethren. Web-based
services have become synonymous with cloud computing; you can't mention
one without the other. But there's more to cloud computing than feeding
off services that live on remote web servers.
Wouldn't it be
great if you could access your everyday desktop apps, from anywhere, on
any type of machine, irrespective of its hardware prowess? And when we
say desktop apps, we mean both Linux and Windows.
That's exactly
what Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) is designed for. After you've got
it set up, you can serve as many native Windows and Linux apps to as
many concurrent users. And it gets better: in the true spirit of the
cloud, all that's needed to access the desktop apps is a web browser.
Ulteo
OVD relies on two components - a Session Manager and an Application
Server - to create virtual desktops that run inside web browsers. To
deliver both Linux and Windows apps, you need to run application servers
inside at least one instance of each OS.
Setting it up isn't too
much hassle, but you will need to be familiar with the network setup.
It's ideal for installations that need to deliver a mixture of apps and
are willing to take a hit in performance. Since the apps are served from
within remote application servers, make sure these machines are
powerful enough to minimise the performance penalty. If you run multiple
instances of app servers, you can easily balance the load between them.
The best thing about Ulteo OVD is that it can also act as a
centralised file manager. Users can create and save files on the server
for their own use, as well as creating shared folders.
Files and documents
There
are two ways to carry your data with you wherever you go: you can
either send it to one of several online storage providers, or let the
web app keep it for you.
Google Docs is an example of the latter.
This free service lets you create and share text documents,
spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and more in various formats,
including PDF. It's also available as an Android app, so you connect to
it and work on the documents from your mobile phone.
Besides
creating and editing documents, you can use the Google Docs Android app
to upload images to your account. The browser-based version also enables
you to upload PDFs. All the documents created either on the web
interface or uploaded from your phone are kept on Google's servers, and
are thus accessible from wherever you connect. Additionally, you can
share these documents with other Google Docs users, who can in turn
share their docs with you.
The basic free version of Google Docs
allows up to 1GB of free storage and you can purchase more space
starting from $5 (about £3) per year for 20GB. In its current form,
Google Docs requires an active internet connection for you to work on
your documents, but the ability to work offline, which leverages the
HTML5 capabilities of the Chrome browser, is about to be rolled out.
Another similar option is the Java- based ThinkFree Office suite, which is pre-installed on several Android-based handsets.
Online duffel bag
If you need dedicated storage warehouses to keep your stuff online, there are plenty of services available.
Canonical's
Ubuntu One service is tightly integrated into new releases of the
distro. You can sync files with your online Ubuntu One account via the
right-click Context menu. You can then view these by logging on to the
Ubuntu One website. You can also upload files via the web interface,
which will automatically be synced with your Ubuntu installation.
Dropbox
is a cross-platform service and both Jolicloud and Peppermint have
built-in support for it, so you can access your files from any of these
web desktops. A
more comprehensive cross-platform solution for backing up and syncing
files is SpiderOak. You can mix the web apps to get out of a sticky
situation. For example, what if you need a file that's on your desktop
at home, and all you have is your Android phone?
If you have the
TeamViewer remote desktop viewer on your desktop, you can connect to it
using the TeamViewer app on the Android device, copy the file into
Dropbox or share it via SpiderOak, and it will automatically be synced
to your phone.
Address book, calendar and email
For
those who you work on the move, access to your emails and address books
is vital if you want to stay productive. You need to be able to sync
them across your office and home computers, across operating systems and
to your mobile phone.
Online email, by design, is globally
accessible and requires nothing more than a web browser, but there are
tools that enable you to use it offline, either on your laptop or on
your phone, and then sync the two when you go online.
If you use
Gmail or any other web-based email service that enables you to grab
email via the IMAP protocol, you can keep your online account in sync
with your laptop by connecting to it via any cross-platform email
client, such as Mozilla's Thunderbird or Novell's Evolution.
Accessing
Gmail on your Android device is a no-brainer, since these phones ship
with a Gmail app that helps you set up multiple Gmail accounts, and even
downloads messages for offline viewing.
If you use your own
hosted email server, you can access it from any computer via a webmail
client such as Horde, SquirrelMail, Roundcube and so on. Just like with
Gmail, you can fetch emails from your own hosted server into a desktop
email client as long as you know its IMAP settings.
Android
phones also enable you to sync email accounts from your hosted email
server via IMAP. You'll find several IMAP email clients on the Android
market.
K-9 Mail is one of the most feature-packed and, alongside
IMAP, also supports POP3 and Microsoft Exchange Server. K-9 also works
with the Android Privacy Guard (APG) app and enables you to send
encrypted emails.
As well as email, once you've set up a Gmail
account on your Android device, your address book and contacts are also
automatically synced. Any additions or changes to your Gmail calendar or
contacts will automatically be reflected on your phone, and vice versa.
Google Calendar supports the CalDAV standard, so you can sync it with Microsoft Outlook using the Google Calendar Sync utility, as well as with Apple's iCal or Mozilla's Sunbird.
Similarly, there are extensions for desktop email clients to sync contact information. The Google Contacts add-on
for Thunderbird automatically detects Google accounts and syncs
contacts between the Google and Thunderbird address books. If you use
Evolution, your client already has the built-in ability to sync your
Evolution contacts with Google's address book.
Step-by-step: Set up K-9 on Android
01. Add an account
After
you've downloaded and installed K-9 from the Android market, start the
setup process by entering your email address and password. 2. Connection settings
The
next step involves specifying the IMAP connection settings for your
webmail server. The K-9 setup program tries to guess the values based on
your email address. 03. Account settings
After
you've set up your account, you can fine-tune it. You might want to
hook it up with APG to send encrypted messages or ask it to store
messages in the SD card.
Music
If
you had to pick one area of the Linux desktop that's seen tons of
development over the past few years, it has to be multimedia.
Everything, from recording to streaming, has improved in leaps and
bounds.
Popular music players, such as Banshee, Rhythmbox and
Amarok, can now handle media in all formats, in patent-encumbered codecs
including MP3, MPEG and WMA, and free formats such as Ogg, Theora, FLAC
and so on.
Banshee is the default music player in Ubuntu, while
you'll find Rhythmbox in several Gnome-based Linux distributions and
Amarok in KDE-based ones. Besides playing music, you can use all three
to subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favourite podcasts and internet
radio stations such as Last.fm, and listen to audiobooks from LibriVox.
With
both Amarok and Rhythmbox, you can stream music from Jamendo and
Magnatune, while Banshee lets you buy music from Amazon's MP3 store
(currently only available to its US customers), and from Ubuntu One
Music Store.
When you buy tracks from Ubuntu One's music service,
the songs are automatically synced with your Ubuntu One account, so if
you format your disk, or move to another computer, your music moves with
you. Just log in to your Ubuntu One music account from within Banshee
and your tunes will automatically be synced to the new machine. You can
also install the Ubuntu One Music app from the Android store, and listen
to your music on your handset!
Stream machine
If
you don't use Ubuntu, or need to stream music from your own cloud, you
have a couple of options depending on how you've set things up.
The
easiest way to stream your music collection is with Tonido. The
software includes a music streaming app, aptly called Jukebox, that
enables you to access all your music from anywhere on the internet via a
web browser or on your phone via an Android app.
Jukebox
supports several popular formats, including Ogg, MP3, WMA, FLAC, M4A and
so on. Just point it to your music folders and it'll create a database
of your entire collection. It also has some powerful management
features, and even enables you to edit MP3 tags to make the songs
searchable. Additionally, you can create guest users and stream your
entire music collection to them.
If all you need to do is stream
music, get yourself the Java-based Subsonic server, which is a dedicated
music streamer. Besides making your music collection accessible via any
web browser, it too can also stream music to an Android mobile phone.
Subsonic supports any music format that can stream over HTTP, including
MP3, Ogg and AAC.
If you have music in another format, such as
WAV, Subsonic also includes a transcoding engine that converts music to
MP3 before streaming on-the-fly.
Share your music
Other
people can subscribe to your music stream with network-enabled media
players, such as VLC or iTunes, or use the in-built Flash-based player
to listen from within a web browser.
Subsonic uses a battery of
open source software for tasks such as on-the-fly resampling for
streaming to locations where bandwidth is limited, and for parsing and
editing MP3 tags. It also implements the SHOUTcast protocol, which
enables players that support this protocol, such as Winamp, iTunes and
XMMS, to display metadata information on the playing track.
Binaries
for Subsonic are available in both Deb and RPM formats, as well as in
the WAR format for deploying Subsonic with a Tomcat, Jetty, GlassFish or
Geronimo server if you have one already set up. Subsonic can also be
used with Windows and Mac OS X.
Once you've installed the binary
under your platform, head to your web browser to do some basic
configuration, such as pointing it to the folder where you keep your
music, then tweak network settings to access the installation over the
internet.
Photos
Something
that almost all of us keep on the web are images, be it on Facebook,
Flickr, Picasa or any other photo sharing service. There are a whole
host of tools that enable you to edit, tag and upload images from your
computer to these services.
In addition to cross-platform tools
offered by the services themselves, many popular image-editing programs
have the ability to upload images as well. Flickr doesn't have any
official tools to manage your photo stream from Linux, but you'll find a
couple of nice third-party tools in your distro's repository.
Check
out Postr if you want a simple upload-only utility for Gnome. For KDE
users there's Kflickr. There's also the Desktop Flickr Organiser for
Gnome users, which isn't under active development but still works. In
fact, most of these tools haven't been updated in a while, but they all
work as advertised.
The easiest platform-independent way to
upload photos to Flickr is by emailing them to your unique Flickr
address using the subject line to specify a title, and the body to add a
description and tags. Google has a photo management app for Linux that
will also upload images to its Picasa web album service.
Mobile
phones have added a new dimension to uploading images to photosharing
sites. Many Android phones ship with Facebook and Picasa apps that, when
configured, can upload images to your accounts on these websites
straight from the mobile phone itself.
Then there's Flickr
Companion, which is one of the most popular tools for managing your
Flickr photostream from an Android phone. It lets you set up and manage
multiple Flickr accounts, and browse the Flickr photos, sets and
collections under each. The best bit is that you can download your
images directly from Flickr on to your phone and set them as wallpapers
or contact photos.
Share scheme
If
you don't want to rely on these services, you can create your own web
album, either by using a dedicated content management system built to
host images, such as the Gallery CMS, or with plugins for a normal CMS
that add photo management features to it, such as the YAPB plugin for
WordPress.
The better option, if you wish to keep the photos to
yourself, with the convenience of directly uploading them via a mobile
phone, is to use Tonido. The NAS software bundles an app called Photos,
so you can share your exploits with the camera with friends and family.
As
with all things Tonido, the Photos module also has comprehensive
organising abilities and enables you to tag the images. Once shared,
others can rate the photos and comment on them. All they need is a web
browser.
Step-by-step: Uploading images to Minus
1. Register Minus
is a new online sharing service that keeps your images (and other
content) in sync, whether you've uploaded it from a browser or from your
mobile phone. 2. Install on desktop Once
you've registered with the service, you can download its client to your
Linux desktop, or as an extension inside the Chrome and Firefox
browsers. 3. Install on phone
The
Android app enables you to upload images from your mobile. Minus
ensures that no matter how you uploaded the images they're visible on
all your devices.
Social networking
By
its very design, a social networking service lives in the cloud, a lot
like web-based email services. As with any web-based application, the
main advantage is that you can use it from within any web browser. The
main disadvantage is that it isn't always straightforward to use it
offline.
There are several desktop apps on Linux that enable you
to send tweets, dents and updates to your Twitter, Identica and Facebook
accounts. There's Gwibber for Gnome users, and Choqok if you run KDE.
Both work with multiple social networking services, and even let you
browse through your timeline when offline.
Similarly, there are
several instant messaging clients that work with a variety of IM
services and even IRC. Empathy, Pidgin, Xchat and Kopete are the most
popular.
If you need one app that can work across social networks
and does IM as well, there's Yoono, which supports Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, AIM, Gtalk and Yahoo
Chat amongst others. It's available as a desktop application for Linux,
as well as a browser app for Firefox and Chrome.
With the browser
app you can easily share links, videos and other stuff you come across
on the web with your friends on the configured social networks. If you
don't use either of the supported browsers, there's the desktop version
with a similar interface.
Tweet talk
TweetDeck,
which is available as a desktop app and an Android app, goes a step
further and can also be found in Chrome's webstore. It too supports a
variety of social networks, including the most popular ones.
The
biggest advantage with TweetDeck, though, is that you can register with
the service, which saves you having to log in to all your networks from
each device and gives you some added advantages, such as scheduling
messages.
If you need to send dents to your Identica accounts
from your Android device try Twitdroyd, Mustard or Seesmic. These
clients seamlessly plug into other social networking services to enable
you to share media or shorten URLs.
To find more apps that you
can use from your web browser as well as your Android phone, head to
Chrome's webstore and search for "Android". This will bring you a whole
list of apps that you can use to sync all types of content from your
desktop at home or work via a web browser, and when you're roaming with
your phone.
Some of the useful ones are Springpad, a note-taking
app; Read Later Fast, which saves web pages for offline reading; the IMO
instant messenger; Android Push Contacts, which sends SMS messages from
the browser to Android devices; and the Nimbits data logger, which can
also export the recorded data to Google Docs.
Step-by-step: Be omnipresent with Yoono
01. Add a service Yoono
can currently be installed inside Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox
browsers. Once installed, start by adding your accounts on the popular
networks it supports. 02. Fine-tune settings After
you've added all the accounts, you can tweak settings for a particular
service. For example, like Google+ Circles, Yoono enables you to
assemble your FB friends in groups to better manage updates. 03. Start sharing Yoono
makes it easier to share anything you come across on the internet with
your friends using the Share button, which enables you to pick out
videos or text from within other browser tabs.
Privacy and online data
Throughout
this feature we've looked at various ways you can access and manage all
types of data from all sorts of places, and keep it all in sync.
Getting to the data is the easy bit. The real question is how you want
to store it - offload it to a remote server or host it in your own
cloud?
The first option is more convenient, especially if you
don't want to faff about building your own server, and just want to
start sharing. But hosting your own cloud server gives you more
flexibility and control over who accesses your data and how.
The
most important issue is security. Not everybody is willing to put all
kinds of documents and passwords on to servers outside their
jurisdiction. This is also why most of the services, be they for storing
arbitrary documents or passwords or your online bank account, ensure
privacy either by encrypting data or securing the channel through which
it's transmitted.
Another important factor is cost. Many remote
services are free with up to 2GB of storage, and offer additional
storage at throwaway prices.
Plugging the gap
Despite
the availability of the software, many users are deterred from hosting
their own cloud server by the overheads that come with running it. This
is where plug computers come in.
A plug computer is a small form
factor computer that's meant to be used as an always-on server. It's got
enough juice to run the server software and is stripped of all the
exotic hardware you'll find on a normal computer, such as graphics cards
or serial, parallel, PS/2 and VGA ports. This is also why plug
computers consume a lot less power than traditional servers. Often
they're enclosed in an AC power plug or AC adapter - hence the name.
The
Tonido NAS software is available on top of a plug computer, and there's
a version of the Amahi Home Server that can be installed on top of a
plug server. Besides the SheevaPlug, it's been tested on several other
plugs machines, including Ionics Plugs and Guru Plug.
Freedom fighters
Earlier
this year, Eben Moglen, chairman of the Software Freedom Law Centre,
announced the FreedomBox project to develop new personal server software
for people who care about data privacy. As you've probably guessed, the
FreedomBox software will run atop plug computers.
Moglen created
the FreedomBox Foundation to develop the server, which will run "a free
software operating system, with free applications designed to create
and preserve personal privacy". The idea is to deploy the FreedomBox
installations in a peer-to-peer fashion. Users will then use this
network for a variety of purposes - for example, to keep encrypted
copies of their backups on other computers in the network.
Users
will also be able to send and receive encrypted emails, make VoIP calls
that can't be intercepted and create their own alternative to social
networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, without locking
up their data.
FreedomBox will be based on Debian and many of its
developers are from the Debian development community, including its
lead developer Bdale Garbee, the former Debian project leader. The
project was funded via the crowdfunding service Kickstarter, where it
raised over $86,000.
Currently under development, the FreedomBox
software won't cost anything and will be made up of several pieces of
free software. The only cost will be that of the hardware - the plug
computer server.
Moglen has been quoted in a New York Times
article as saying that these plug computers will "get very cheap, very
quick" coming down from the current $99 (about £62) to $29 (around £18).
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