Getting Started with SparkleShare

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If you follow Linux-related news, you've probably heard about SparkleShare, a promising open source alternative to the popular Dropbox service. SparkleShare has been under active development for some time, but the latest 0.2.2 release is actually the first version suitable for practical use. Mind you, it's far from ready for production use, so install it only if you want to satisfy your curiosity, or if you enjoy using bleeding edge releases.

While you can find .deb SparkShare packages in the wild, your best bet is to compile the software from source. This is a rather straightforward thing to do. First off, you need to install the required dependencies. On Ubuntu, this can be done by executing the following command:

sudo apt-get install gtk-sharp2 mono-runtime mono-devel monodevelop libndesk-dbus1.0-cil-dev nant libnotify-cil-dev libgtk2.0-cil-dev libwebkit-cil-dev intltool libtool python-nautilus libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil-dev libappindicator0.1-cil-dev

Grab then the latest source package from the project's website, unpack it, switch to the resulting directory in the terminal, and compile the software using three simple commands:

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

Next step is to set up a Git repository. Although SparkleShare can use GitHub and Gitorious as its file storage back-end, setting up a Git repository on your own server makes a lot of sense. It is also a rather straightforward process, and the How to set up your own server wiki page provides detailed instructions.

With all the pieces in place, launch SparkleShare using the sparkleshare start command. When prompted, specify your server's address in the following format: user@remotehost. Enter then the pass to the Git repository on your server like this: /path/to/dir/repositoryname.git. Press Finish and you are done. Repeat the setup process on other machines.

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