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Revision as of 19:59, 20 May 2011 by Duffy (talk | contribs)

Warning
You should have signed the Fedora Individual Contributor License Agreement before contributing any content to the Sparkleshare repo. You may do so in the Fedora Account System.

What is SparkleShare?

SparkleShare is a 100% free and open source, cross-platform file sharing system started by Hylke Bons. The idea for the project came from the 2010 GNOME UX Hackfest. It's very similar to Dropbox or Box.net, but it is backed by the free and open source version control system git.

Basically, the way it works is that you will have a special folder on your computer, called 'Sparkleshare', and everything in that folder is also present in a version-controlled remote git repository. If you create a new file in a Sparkleshare folder, it will immediately be committed and pushed into the remote git repository, and everyone else who is using Sparkleshare to connect to that folder will be able to see the file you just created appear in their Sparkleshare folders. If someone else opens the file you just created and modifies it, their Sparkleshare client will automatically commit and push their changes to the repository, and you'll be able to see them in your Sparkleshare folder (and you'll get a handy notification!)

Sparkleshare is a great, free & open source way to collaborate on files, without worrying about manual version control or having to manually upload and broadcast links to your work.

Pre-Requisites

You're going to need the following things before you can start following this tutorial!

Summary

  1. Install the Sparkleshare yum repo to your system, install Sparkleshare and ssh-askpass, and remove nautilus-python.
  2. Configure Sparkleshare for the Fedora design team git repo.
  3. Configure your Fedora SSH key for use with Sparkleshare.
  4. Sparkle away!

Step 1: Install Sparkleshare

  1. Open up a terminal.
  2. Go to the yum repositories directory:
    • cd /etc/yum.repos.d
  3. As root, download Alex Hudson's Sparkleshare Fedora People Repo:
    • sudo curl -O http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/alexh/sparkleshare/fedora-sparkleshare.repo
  4. Install sparkleshare and ssh-askpass:
    • sudo yum install -y sparkleshare ssh-askpass
  5. Remove nautilus-python (I don't know why, but if you have this installed and install Sparkleshare, Nautilus will segfault on startup. If you remove it, though, everything works fine.)
    • sudo yum remove -y nautilus-python

You now have Sparkleshare installed.

Configure Sparkleshare for the Fedora design team

  1. Start Sparkleshare, either from your application menus in your desktop environment or on the terminal:
    • sparkleshare start
  2. Sparkleshare will start walking you through a wizard to set up your first repo:
    • Your Name: enter however you wish :)
    • Email address: Please use your @fedoraproject.org email address.
    • On my own server: git.fedorahosted.org/git/
    • Folder Name: design-team.git

Hit Sync. Sparkleshare will try to configure the fedora-design repository, but it will fail because it's not using the right SSH key. But we will fix that!