Announcing Linux Alpha

Hey guys,
I’m pleased to announce initial support for Linux with ZumoDrive. This is a limited release that we are posting only to the forums. We’d love to get your feedback on the release so we can get it ready for public release.

This alpha release has been tested on Ubuntu 8 and 9, Fedora 10, but it should work on other systems as well. Please give us your feedback either in this post, or email support@zumodrive.com.


32 Bit

• .deb package (Ubuntu)


• .rpm package (Fedora, RedHat, CentOS)

• .deb package (Ubuntu)


• .rpm package (Fedora, RedHat, CentOS)

First, I tried ZD in my Thinkpad T60, running Fedora 11 Preview 32bit. Given that PackageKit is not working in F11 so far, I was forced to hunt several dependencies using Yumex. The dependencies were (as I recall) json-glib, xcb and gnet. After installing said dependencies I installed the 32bit .rpm with the rpm -ivh command.
Story was different with my Fedora 11 64bit home computer. This time, rpm complained again about the same dependencies (plus nautilus-extensions), but after installing them and issuing the same “rpm -ivh” command, rpm complained about the same dependencies as if there were not installed at all (I verified, they were indeed installed). Finally and after several tries (including a reboot), I forced installation with the—nodeps option. Gladly, the rpm installed and ZD is up and running so far.
The only thing I can think about is that the 64bit rpm appeared to be looking for the 32bit counterparts of these dependencies, but I did not confirm this suspicion since I had already forced the installation as explained. Hope this helps and I will keep reporting.
Good work and congratulations!

IRT the previous alpha;
On my lenovo N500 with ubuntu 8 and 9 (64 bit) it installed and worked smoothly and though I haven’t used it extensively I have yet to meet any problems that I know of.
I did try to transfer a couple pieces of software from my stationary windows machine to my ubuntu laptop and they were possibly corrupted in the process, but I haven’t been able to verify this.
Cheers.

Magnus, that was an issue in the last build and has been resolved in this one. Please let us know if you still see it.

Downloaded the 64 bit deb package for ubuntu and it installed perfectly, no issues so far….great work guys!

Wanted to share some feedback so far – if this is the wrong forum I apologize in advance.
I’m using 32 bit 0.952 on Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04.
- Ubuntu 8.04: Haven’t dug into it yet, but I’m getting a version mismatch with Java6 and couldn’t install. Could be a problem with my repos.
- On first start-up, the cloud tray icon doesn’t come up. Not certain about a second login, since this is Linux, not Windows, so I probably won’t have to log in again… ever ;)
- Should have an “umount” option, or something similar, in Nautilus. I ran into a problem (possibly because I was using Privoxy as my proxy). When I switched to a different proxy, the ZumoDrive icon on the desktop gives an “endpoint” error, though I can browse and update the drive via the shell.
- Sync delay should be identified. Linux users ssh around quite a bit, and may have different expectations on availability of content from different systems.
- File Caching Properties should either (a) identify the policy of directories outside those predefined or, better, (b) allow policies for other directories.
- Local Storage Drive: Should be more specific where local cache is stored. Concerned about security on a multi-user system.

Michael, good feedback there. We’ll take a look at the issues you saw for the next build.

• Having to log out/in during the isn’t cool—Linux users just aren’t used to having to do so to start applications. I just restarted Nautilus and that seemed to work.
  
• The serif font in the account sign-up thing is a little meh—this is probably Linux’s mediocre font rendering’s fault, but I’d suggest changing it to something a little more FOSS-friendly if you can just to account for their weakness.
  
• I like the use of the Ibex wallpaper—very nice.
  
• The notification bubbles should be integrated w/ Ubuntu’s new notification system.
  
• In Nautilus, I get the unmount arrow next to my ZumoDrive in the sidebar, but when I click it, I get a notification that says:
  ”
  Unable to unmount ZumoDrive
  umount: /home/jake/ZumoDrive is no in the fstab (and you are not root)
  ”
  
• Mouseover previews of audio files work like normal—good job w/ that.
  
• When I clicked “ZumoDrive – view online”, it seemed to stay indefinitely on generating preview (this probably isn’t a Linux thing, but I haven’t used Zumo much in general, so I thought I’d include it in case it was helpful)
  
• The tray icon’s background doesn’t seem to be fully transparent. Using the Dust theme (a dark theme), the cloud has a little gray box around it (see screenshot at http://www.zumodrive.com/share/5oqZTMwND).
  Hope all that helps! Thanks for including Linux!

Using w/Ubuntu/Jaunty; installed easily and working great – I love it. Thanks much!

Jake, thanks for the comments. Lupatrian, thx for the feedback :)

One thing I would suggest is giving the deb the ability to import a Zumodrive Repo so that whenever an update is released, it cycles through with the system updates. I recently saw this employed by the program Xiphos, where it gave you the Xiphos repo when you installed through the deb.

I’m having probems with Jaunty Kubuntu (KDE 4.2) 64-bit, installation on linux works fine but I’m getting a bad crash when launching zumodrive.
Cannot find class: com/versionate/desktop/Application
Exception in thread “main” java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Cannot load resource directory
at com.versionate.desktop.Application.<clinit>(Unknown Source)

Bryan, we haven’t tried this on a KDE environment before, so it probably doesn’t work properly. It also has integrations with Nautilus, instead of the KDE equivalent.

Hi David,
Do you have any plans to add support for KDE (Dolphin file manager) ? If you have an open API, I can help getting it up.
FYI for those that need to run zumodrive in KDE 4.2.
1) Install nautilus
> sudo aptitude install nautilus
2) Change default file manager in kde (optional but it’d nice if your entire system use the same file manager)
> systemsettings
Choose “Advance” Tab > Choose “File Associations” > Choose “inode” > Choose “Directory”
Under application preference order
Click “Add” and then type in ”/usr/bin/nautilus”
3) Then install zumodrive
sudo dpkg -i zumodrive*.deb

Have installed on openSUSE 11.1. Had to use http://software.opensuse.org/search to find RPMs for libgnet2 and libjson-glib, and then still install with—nodeps because it didn’t recognise that I do have java installed.
The GUI seems to be working all okay, but it does not seem to be syncing anything. Do I have to do file I/O with nautilus, or can I just use cp from the shell?
I did log out and back in, but haven’t rebooted yet, so that may make a difference.

Ubuntu 9.04 installed and operating without issue. Thanks !

Just in follow up wrt running on openSUSE 11.1. The program runs, but it does not appear to actually do any syncing.

Is this package x86 specific or is it cross-platform (isn’t it written java?)?
I would like to install on linux/ppc.
Thanks,
-mm

Marco,
This package is indeed x86 specific at the current time.

Adam, thanks for the answer … any plans on porting it?

Marco,
Currently we don’t have plans to port Zumo to PPC.

Help! I need to move the cache off of my SSD!
I installed the Alpha .deb onto my little ASUS eeePC Intrepid Ibex. There was only one glitch during installation – the JRE6 asks for acceptance of the license, and since I was using the Gdebi Package Installer, the installation appeared to have hung. The Package Installer has an optional terminal window, so I was able to answer “y”. Maybe your future releases could automatically answer the license question?
Once installed, I tried viewing some photos and streaming some video, which I had added to my ZumoDrive from my Windows desktop machine. But I soon realized that my SSD was quickly filling up due to your local cacheing!! I only have a 4 GB SSD, and now it’s over 90% full.
In the settings, there is no way to set the cache location to my 8 GB SDHC card. I would dearly like to move the cache there.
Failing that, I will simply delete the cached files – so, where are they hiding?
Jeff Schallenberg
Mont Saint Hilaire, Québec

Jeff, you can set the cache size in settings. Currently you cannot move it for Linux, we’ll be adding support for that later.

Hey there. Great product so far. I’m funning a drive between an a Gateway Laptop, a Eee PC 900 (both running jaunty) and an iPhone and overall it’s been pretty good. Just thought I’d mention that the settings panel has an advanced tab that lets you choose the hard drive to store the cache on, but I’m not sure if it will show a usb card or not. It certainly doesn’t show my NTFS partitions. Maybe only the interface is implemented at present.
My one comment is that on my Eee PC ZumoDrive seems to make nautilus load noticeably slower. This may be due to the low memory I have in there (only 512 mb) but it would be nice to have the option for zumodrive to not automatically load on nautilus startup. On that low power device it would be worth it to have an extra step at times (I would leave it auto starting as the default, but have a setting to allow it to not)
Similarly, every once in a while I will open an instance of nautlius as root and it will start a new instance of zumodrive as root as well (it pops open the account authentication screen and I cancel out of it)
Lastly, I second the call for a repository for automatic updates. It’s a very powerful built in system to manage end-user experience.

I’m getting “404 – File Not Found” when trying to download the debian packages.