The Open Sourcerer

Our friends at Canonical have been busy working on a new software as a service offering called Ubuntu One. This news was broken today by the VAR guy, but we thought we would dig a little deeper into what it is all about. Ubuntu One is in short a utility for synchronising stuff between desktop computers running the favourite operating system of you and me. The home URL of the service is https://ubuntuone.com/ and if you go there it will add your launchpad account to the list of people who want to join the beta. The Installation page guides you through downloading a little .deb file which adds a private PPA (yes if you expand the acronym that is a double private – it is at private-ppa.launchpad.net) to your sources.list, from then on you can install ubuntuone-client with apt or synaptic. This installs the application, but as it is a web service you need to be in the beta to get much further.

Digging about in the PPA reveals the source tar.gz in which we can learn a bit more. Firstly it is a GPL3 licensed python application. In the doc area is a very nice little schematic describing the connect and sync process:

The rest is just lots of code and it is probably best to wait for it to run to see what it does. I will leave you with this fragment from a main.py deep in the tree because it made me smile:

  self.logger.debug("I can't attain Nirvana yet."
    " [state: %s; queues:"
    " metadata: %d; content: %d; hash: %d]"
    % (self.state.name,
      len(self.action_q.meta_queue),
      len(self.action_q.content_queue),
      len(self.hash_q)))
  return
self.logger.debug("Nirvana reached!! I'm a Buddha")

We are looking forward to playing with this one in more detail.

Tags: Canonical, launchpad, Ubuntu, Ubuntu One

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 11:40 by Alan Bell and is filed under FLOSS in the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.