Ubuntu One wasn’t working on my 10.04 box – how I got it going

Now that the Ubuntu One cloud-storage service can sync any directory in the system instead of just things in a Ubuntu One folder, I have been anxious to start using it to sync my files to the cloud for availability not just on any other Ubuntu machines I might set up but also via the Web interface (and hopefully in other OSes, Linux and not, in the future).

So I tried to get Ubuntu One going in this newish 10.04 installation. No go. I logged in, but nothing would sync.

Perhaps my “situation” is unusual (but there are enough Ubuntu users that it could be more common than I think). Here it is:

I briefly had Ubuntu 9.10 installed on a different computer, with which I created an account and used Ubuntu One. That computer has since been parted out to make this current laptop work.

Now I have this “new” computer with Ubuntu 10.04. Logging into Ubuntu One, the system listed my “old” computer as a synced device. There was nowhere to add a new computer on the Web page, as detailed in the Ubuntu One how-to. Yep, no “add this computer” button.

I did a bit of searching and found this Ubuntu forum post in which Ubuntu One developer Joshua Hoover gives these instructions:

I’m sorry this process isn’t as streamlined as it could be. We’re working on fixing that, but in the time being, you should be able to open System->Preferences->Ubuntu One and then get prompted in a web browser window to add your computer to your Ubuntu One account. If this never happens, can you do the following?

1. Open Applications->Accessories->Passwords and Encryption Keys

2. If you have an UbuntuOne token (under Passwords: default), right-click and select delete

3. Open a terminal session (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and run:
killall ubuntuone-login ubuntuone-syncdaemon

4. Open System->Preferences->Ubuntu One

5. A browser window should open and you should be prompted to add your computer

In my case, doing steps 1 and 2, there were no UbuntuOne tokens in the Passwords and encryption keys.

So I went to step 3, and ran this line in the terminal:

$ killall ubuntuone-login ubuntuone-syncdaemon

Then I went to the Ubuntu One application (System-Preferences-Ubuntu One), and I was then prompted to add my current computer.

Now all looks good in the Ubuntu One window. But none of my files are yet visible at https://one.ubuntu.com/files/.

I’ll wait a bit. More later.

Later: I rebooted, and when I logged in, Ubuntu One was active, but none of my files were syncing.

Before I was able to actually add this computer to the Ubuntu One account, I had only chosen one folder to sync – which I did in the file browser by right-clicking on it and then left-clicking on “Synchronize to Ubuntu One” in the resulting menu.

Now that the machine was hooked up to Ubuntu One, I did this again – right-clicked on the folder and then syncronized it. The sync began immediately, and a minute or so later the folder was accessible in my Web interface at https://one.ubuntu.com/files/.

Hopefully this process is super-intuitive for new users who don’t have Ubuntu One accounts left over from previous machines.

So now it’s working. I’m not treating this as a backup. I’ve heard stories about people who accidentally deleted files on their Ubuntu machine and hoped to pull them from their Ubuntu One backup. But since their Ubuntu One account had already synced, the files were gone from the cloud, too. So my existing backup routines will continue.

Like most users I expect, I’m sticking with the free 2 GB plan. Sure I have more than 2 GB of files, and the 50 GB plan would take care of that, but $10/month is a bit pricey for my current needs, which are probably somewhere in the 5-10 GB range. I’d rather pay for a backup service like rsync.net that doesn’t automatically sync, or something Time Machinish that does snapshots that will allow me to go back and grab old files.

And I’m ramping up my use of Google Docs – my complaint about syntax highlighting seems to be solved, as I wrote some HTML in Docs — and it was pleasantly colored. I’ll probably be taking advantage of the bulk upload to Docs once I separate my image files from my text files, a separation I used to adhere to but abandoned due to laziness. (I don’t need a bunch of JPEGs mucking up my Google Docs files …).

What Google Docs and Gmail are allowing me to do is work not just across Ubuntu machines but with any computer I happen to be using, whether it’s one of mine or not. At the moment anyway, that flexibility is worth letting Google spy on me and market to me based on that spying.

However, Google One and technologies like it — with files in the cloud (either synced or cloud-only) and local applications accessing them — seems to allow for a more full-featured computing experience than the current crop of Web-based applications such as Google Docs. However, I am enjoying all the features of Gmail that traditional mail clients such as Thunderbird and Evolution don’t have.

Google Apps falls down at Brown, Microsoft’s cloud challenge and marching orders for Apps developers

More than a few institutions of higher learning (including California State University Northridge, I’ve learned) are in the process of transitioning from traditional e-mail services (generally Web-delivered, I believe) to Google Apps, through which students and faculty will have e-mail and documents managed by Google (thus either freeing university IT staff to “work on other things,” which could mean “other things,” or “you’re fired”; unsure on that one).

Anyhow, it’s no secret that I’m a proponent and occasional user of Google Apps (more Sites, some Docs and Mail), and the city of Los Angeles’ exploration of Apps for its use has put the spotlight even more tightly on Google and its response to and resolution of problems.

So Brown University is among the schools moving to Google Apps, and recently some students discovered that through Gmail they were able to read hundreds of messages in other students’ e-mail boxes.

Not terribly secure. It turns out that 22 students were able to read others’ e-mail, but there has been some criticism aimed at Google for a) taking 3 days to resolve the problem and b) not communicating well (or pretty much at all) with the university’s IT department after the problem was discovered.

“It was a small hiccup along the way and it’s an issue we’ve taken extremely seriously,” Google’s Rajan Sheth told The New York Times. (And you know when The New York Times gets involved, there’s considerable heat on your ass).

What I’ll say is that these things happen, and Google should be getting better at having them not happen. I don’t know how they’re doing on that. I suspect we’ll either hear more (especially if things don’t go well at CSUN) or hear less (if things do go well).

And as I, along with scores of others, have written recently, Microsoft’s own cloud-based apps are starting to roll out, although it’ll be awhile before they work at all (the Word component is still read-only) and probably a longer while before they are as well integrated with each other and with a matching e-mail component, and also a long time (or even never) before documents are as easily shared and collaborated on as they are in Google Apps.

You never know, especially at this early stage. One thing I do hope is that a) Google learns from all these glitches and smooths out these transitions, and b) the competition from Microsoft pushes Google to upgrade Apps that much more quickly and start adding the missing functionality (like easily created paragraph indents and “smart” quotes) that would make using Docs more like a true MS Word-type application and less like a souped-up, HTML- and CSS-powered text editor.

Now that the federal goverment — and Microsoft — are going all in on cloud apps, city of L.A. has more reason to do so

That’s a long title, eh? I suppose I should tighten up on it, but in the wild-west world of blogging, it’s writer’s choice, am I right?

Anyhow, the two big topics these days are the new apps.gov site which helps government agencies choose cloud-based applications, and Microsoft’s unveiling of an early version of its Office Web suite, which brings longtime cash-generator MS Office into the cloud and accessible via a Web browser near you.

So if the federal government is recommending cloud-based applications, and Microsoft is making cloud-based apps, if only to compete with Google Apps (which is eating Microsoft’s lunch and eyeing its breakfast and dinner, too), then apps and data in the cloud are starting to look a whole lot more mainstream.

And the city of Los Angeles’ interest in adopting Google Apps isn’t looking so out there.

I give Microsoft a whole lot of grief in this blog, and it’s pretty obvious that the company has been reacting (instead of acting or innovating) since its founding. How can you argue with it? It’s probably one of the most successful companies in American history.

And in this case, the development of Office Web is a reaction to the innovation of Google and others in developing browser-based applications.

Still, Microsoft is Microsoft, and Office is Office, and if you’re a big entity like the City of Los Angeles, I encourage you to test out all the alternatives, including Google Apps, Microsoft Office Web, Zoho and anything else I’ve either forgotten to mention or haven’t ever heard of.

Many of my fellow users of free, open-source software think cloud computing is going to take away our freedom, hurt open-source innovation and compromise our data. I don’t know whether all, some or none of these things will happen.

What I do know is that in the near future, data and apps in the cloud is going to happen, government and the enterprise is already going there, and millions of others will soon follow.

And I believe that there’s a place in this paradigm for huge makers of proprietary software, huge Web-based companies, plus companies and developers of software both free/open and otherwise to create new ways of creating, accessing, storing and manipulating the data that we derive from our personal and professional lives.

The Google battle continues over City of L.A.

The Daily News has been in the thick of the fight over whether Google Apps — principally Gmail and Google Docs — should be adopted by the City of Los Angeles to replace current systems that are aging and said to be much less than reliable.

Much of the battle is over whether a Web-accessed system for e-mail and document creation (and collaboration) will be as secure as systems with traditional servers. Detractors worry about information being compromised, but others say that Google has a lot more on the ball security- and redundancy-wise than the systems currently in place.

In the past few days, a couple op-eds have run in the paper:

• “Google on Google’ Gmail: Why it’s good for city hall” by Dave Girouard (president of enterprise for Google)
• “Can Google really protect and serve Los Angeles?” by By Paul M. Weber (president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League)

Before that, there was my column on the matter:

• Google Apps can work for L.A. Just mind the passwords

I’ve written about Gmail and Google Docs quite a bit in the past, and regarding their use by entities such as the city of Los Angeles, I’ll try to state my opinion a bit more quickly than usual. I’ll bullet-point it:

• Lots of organizations are farming out their e-mail to Gmail. Google does a great job with this app. It’s different enough in many useful ways from other e-mail clients, both on- and offline, to stand out of the pack. The ability to “tag” messages seems so simple yet borders on revolutionary.
• Google Docs isn’t as sophisticated as Microsoft Office. Google Docs does work, and if you’re willing to think outside the document-creating box for your text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, it probably handles 95 percent of the needs of 95 percent of the people 95 percent of the time. For “specialty” uses, the city can still install traditional client software such as Microsoft Office or the free OpenOffice. The great thing about Google Docs is that it makes collaboration on and sharing of documents an integral and seamless part of their creation and modification. For an organization like the city, this is a huge thing. Still, I hope the city is prepared to hire a development team to “build out” Google Docs with the many specialized templates that will be needed to make this system work.
• Having Google hold onto the data of the city means much less software and hardware needs to be purchased, maintained and managed.
• This is pretty much the future: cloud-based storage (with top-grade archiving and backup) and network-delivered applications. The city might as well go there now.

Google could kneecap Microsoft with Chrome OS

It’s the announcement we’ve all be waiting for, one that Google at one point in the past said it wouldn’t make.

But it did:

Google will release its own PC operating system, Chrome OS, to leverage the company’s Web-based Google Apps and bypass Microsoft’s Windows operating system entirely on not just netbooks but every PC platform from the smallest ARM ultraportable to a full Intel-based desktop.

(See CNet’s Webware post on the announcement)

In a very-much related move, Google made the symbolic move of removing the “beta” tag from its core Web-based apps for Mail, Docs, Calendar and Talk. Not that anything has changed about those apps in the past day or so, but according to ZDnet, the move from “beta” to what can only be assumed is production-ready status, whether real, imagined or long overdue, makes those applications attractive to the corporate/enterprise customers Google hopes to attract to Google Apps and now the Google Chrome OS.

And while the Google Chrome OS will be based on the Linux kernel, it could very well end what little preloading of other Linux-based OSes is left in the netbook space. Nobody outside of the fanboy contingent knows what Ubuntu (or any other current Linux distribution) is, and that doesn’t seem likely to change, my 1,000+ blog posts on the subject notwithstanding.

Google Docs: Not its brightest moment (or mine) on my desktop

So I’m working on a not-so-complicated (but not plain text) document that began its life some time ago in Microsoft Word, which means it’s a .doc file that got uploaded to Google Docs.

It sort of, kind of looked OK in Google Docs, except that in a few places I couldn’t get the fonts and the margins right.

And outputting the Google Docs document back into .doc or .odt (OpenDocument) was a real mess, with a mix of Web styles, Word styles, strange margins, etc.

After getting nowhere fast in Google Docs, I finally tried to remove all formatting and start over. But I couldn’t even get the line spacing right.

I’m sure a little CSS hackery could have made things right, but I’m not in any mode to do that.

So I exported the document in .odt format and worked on it in OpenOffice Writer. Now I can save it as an HTML, MS Word or RTF document, or better yet export it as a PDF.

I love having Google Docs enable me to work on things anywhere, at any time, but I’ve found that the cloud-based app works best when documents originate in Google Docs and stay there. Converting them to .odt, RTF and .doc format causes the formatting to break down.

I’ve blogged in the past about how poorly Google Docs offline with Gears worked for me.

So at this point, what would work better for my situation would be cloud-based files accessed by apps on my local client.

And I’d like to see the ability to access networked files in the cloud be available from every application, meaning the feature would be integrated in the operating system or desktop environment and not be part of a single application.

Just a thought. I’ll feel better about Google Docs later this week when I get back to what I mostly use it for. I’m dropping code and documentation into it all the time and sharing those files with my co-workers. That’s one thing that Google Docs does better than anything else I’ve seen.

And I will try to create a heavily formatted document in Docs. I just wish it could be the SAME document shared between Docs and OpenOffice. Maybe a Docs-formatted document would play more nicely in OO than a Word-formatted document turned into a Docs document, then an OO document.

Google Chrome browser: still super-fast

I’ve been getting deep into Google’s many services, and today is no exception. First I discovered a bunch of features in Gmail (Web version, print version) that are turning out to be really helpful.

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I’m using the Google Chrome browser again on my XP box today, since I’m working on our Google fire map and feeding it data from a Google Spreadsheet.

I’m also going to be looking into creating a private Web page for company use at Google Sites, which is targeted as an easy-to-use alternative to corporate Intranets. It’s also a place where you can set up a site just for your family, friends or whoever. If you wish, you can control who gets access to the pages, a feature I will be tapping for this project.

Back to Google Chrome. It’s still incredibly fast, and I can’t wait until it’s ported to OS X and Linux. As I’ve said, it doesn’t have quite the feature set of, say, Firefox, but for the most part I don’t need any of those features and will easily give them up for increased speed on the 99.9 percent of stuff that Chrome does so well.

One thing that preload helps run quickly: OpenOffice

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible.

I’ve written before about how preload doesn’t seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I’d sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

While on the topic of Open Office, I should mention that I’ve been using it quite a bit lately. I like the way the fonts look way better than those in Abiword, and OO just seems to be working well, so I’ve taken to it quite a bit more than in previous months.

Oh, and Google Docs offline under Google Gears has been pretty much a big disappointment.

Since I started using it (with Firefox in Ubuntu), it has lost my database once, and is dog-slow the rest of the time. I hate starting Docs offline in the browser and waiting an age for my files to show up. With this kind of performance — which is in much contrast to Google Docs’ swiftness when connected to the Internet, I’d much rather use a traditional word processor or text editor.

Hence my increasing use of OpenOffice.

Installing Google Gears in Puppy Linux

File this under “why didn’t I think of it before?”

I’ve been complaining for at least a month about how I can’t install Google Gears to gain offline functionality for Google Docs because Gears only supported Firefox 1.5 to 2.x, and I was running Ubuntu with FF3 and Debian with Iceweasel.

Sure, there are ways to make Gears work with Mozilla browsers that don’t go by the name “Firefox,” but it seemed a bit above my capability.

And just today, on the first day of Firefox 3’s official release, I finally installed Gears in Ubuntu 8.04 with FF3.

But I could’ve done this weeks ago, had I only come up with this solution:

I could (and now am) running Google Gears with Docs in Puppy Linux.

I occasionally run Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop, but since the Mozilla-based Seamonkey browser/suite isn’t Firefox, Gears refuses to install.

But … there’s a PET package for Firefox, and I figured that if I install it, I can add Google Gears and gain the offline functionality for Google Docs that I need.

Know what? It works. Sure, the version of Firefox (2.0.0.4) is a bit old, but I’m pretty much going to be using it for this one purpose.

And I’m just so damn stoked that I can run Google Gears with Docs in both Ubuntu 8.04 and Puppy 3.00.

Note: This should work for just about every version of Puppy out there from the 2’s to the 4’s. If you can run the Mozilla-Firefox PET package, you can run Gears.

Now maybe I’ll try that trick on getting Gears working with non-Firefox browsers based on Mozilla.

Google Gears now works with Firefox 3 — and Ubuntu 8.04

Now that Firefox 3 has been officially released, the Google Gears team wasted no time in pounding out a new version of the API that works with FF3.

Coincidentally, this means that Google Gears now works with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which began its life a couple of months ago with the then-non-Gears-supported FF 3 beta.

According to the blog post cited above, the change was made on June 11, but I don’t think the Gears link worked for Linux systems with Firefox 3 (i.e. everybody running Ubuntu 8.04) on that day.

But now that FF3 is officially official, I expect Gears to install in the latest Firefox browser, and I in turn expect my laptop (and me) to be enjoying offline access to my Google Docs files real soon now.

I tried Google Docs with Gears a week ago on Firefox 2 in the Slackware-derived Wolvix Hunter last week, and I was very impressed. Editing of existing Docs files was seamless, and while I miss the ability to create new files in Google Docs while offline, I’m fairly confident that the big brains at Google are hard at work adding this needed bit of functionality to the Docs/Gears world.

By way of explanation, here’s what I know about using Google Gears:

Google Gears is what’s called an API (which stands for Application Programming Interface), and it installs as a Firefox add-on. If you don’t have a live Internet connection, Gears detects this and uses a SQlite database set up in the user’s Firefox directory to allow the ability to read and edit files in Google Docs.

When Gears is first installed, the database is created and populated with all the user’s Google Docs files, after which Gears attempts at the earliest opportunity to sync that database with the files on the online version of Google Docs.

Like I said, I’ve tried it, it’s brilliant, and it’s finally come to the one computer that is regularly offline — my Gateway Solo 1450, which for the time being has no wireless connectivity (something I hope to remedy with a new PCMCIA assembly, should I be able to figure out how to pull the old one and replace it).

Google Gears/Docs update: I installed it in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and it works. I plan to use it often.

Gears/Docs tip: I think I have a way to get around Google Docs/Gears inability to create new documents while offline.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I plan to create a half-dozen to a dozen “dummy” documents in Google Docs while online so I’ll have pre-created, empty documents in which to work when I’m not connected and using Docs via Gears.