Meet SparkleShare, An Open Source Dropbox Alternative [Ubuntu Installation Instructions]

SparkleShare is a syncing tool similar to Dropbox but which allows you to use your own server (or some already existing servers). It uses GIT so if you delete/modify some files by accident, you can easily revert the changes.

The good

SparkleShare has quite a few interesting features / reasons to use it. Obviously the most important one is that you can use it with your own server. Also, it will be available for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.

If you don't want to set up your own server, SparkleShare can be used with Github and Gitorious. These are project hosting solutions that provide free space if you work on Free and Open Source Software projects. Note that using these 2 services, all your synced files will be public!

The bad

- It uses Mono. That's an enough reason for a lot of people not to use it.

- Currently, hosting your own SparkleServer is a bit difficult.

- The files hosted on Github and Gitorious can be accessed by anyone.

- And probably most importantly: GIT is not a good binary storage solution. So if for example you want to store some movies from your holiday or mp3 files, it will at least double the space required for the files (one for the actual file and one copy in the .git directory).

Install SparkleShare (client) in Ubuntu

The installation instructions are for installing the client for use with Gitorious and Github.


1. Download

SparkleShare is still beta. You can download the latest beta from HERE (0.2 beta 1) or get the latest code via Gitorious.

2. Install the dependencies required to compile and run SparkleShare

sudo apt-get install gtk-sharp2 monodevelop mono-devel libndesk-dbus1.0-cil-dev libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil-dev python-nautilus git-core intltool gvfs gvfs-bin python-gtk2-dev openssh-client nant

3. Install SparkleShare

I'll cover the SparkleShare 0.2 beta 1 installation (the difference with getting the code from Git is that you must use ./autogen.sh instead of ./configure): once you've downloaded and extracted the archive, navigate to the folder where you've extracted SparkleShare and run:

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

If you later want to uninstall it, simply navigate again to this folder and run "sudo make uninstall".

Now everything has been set up and you can run SparkleShare via the Applications > Internet > SparkleShare menu item.

4. Set up SparkleShare

For how to use SparkleShare with Gitorious and Github (as well as other questions), refer to the SparkleShare online documentation.


For more info, see the SparkleShare website.