JP Vossen wrote:
Now I'm finally getting my wife to try moving over to TB and FF on
Ubuntu, perhaps with some Picasa (yuck) and OpenOffice thrown in. How
can I most seamlessly connect her to her data from Ubuntu Hardy on her
laptop? (Yes, Hardy, I like LTS versions. But UbuntuOne sounds cool.)
I think you've hit on one of the biggest gaps I see in linux -
networking support. The only really well-integrated networking option
in linux is NFS and it is pretty lousy for a lot of reasons. I think
that samba is probably your most practical option - to be honest samba
is probably better than NFS for sharing data even between two linux
systems under many scenarios. Of course, samba is lousy when it comes
to permissions/symlinks/etc (unless of course you're talking about
between windows machines).
Another option that wasn't mentioned is openafs. In theory that
filesystem offers everything that you're interested in (offline access
(read-only), windows and linux drivers, etc). However, it is pretty
complex to set up - I messed with it and ended up giving up. I really
was interested in using it for my roaming windows profiles since
transferring them across the network really slows login/logoug. If they
were stored on openafs then they could be cached locally and the
filesystem manages the cache so that data isn't retransmitted unless it
really is stale.
If anybody is feeling really daring it might be something worth looking
at. There is a ton of documentation out there, but it is really old.
It also requires delving into Kerberos. Not for the feint of heart.
What I would suggest is getting a Windows program that lets you mount
SSH filesystems as a drive letter. For $40 I got a license to a
program called Expandrive (formerly SFTPDrive) and it works great and
allows easy mounting of any Linux filesystem to a Windows drive lette.
It works great for me, and comes with a free online drive (or did when
I bought it anyways). Look into it.