Since now I mostly use my laptop for school and programming work, I thought of using the desktop as a sort of a server. So I installed ownCloud on it, to test it and see what works. It did take a little going through the code, guesswork, and installing most sql-related packages.
Installation
The first thing, installation instructions on the wiki are outdated, because of the recent addition of dependency on MDB2. The server reported no database driver found, so I sorta guessed what I needed and install MDB2 from Ubuntu packages.
Use
The web GUI looks very bare-bones, and uploading files could certainly be improved. But everything works, so most of the work appears to be done well.
Mounting it as WebDAV also works seamlessly. I only tried it from the laptop running Linux, so I’m not sure about other platforms.
Then I tried to link from its data folder to my 1TB external disk. It might be due to using SQLite as the database, but the server nearly stopped, and I had to restart apache. I haven’t tried using MySQL instead to see if there’s improvement, I’ll experiment with it this week and post the results. It’s quite a shame, because I was looking forward to hosting and sharing my movies and music collection.
Sharing
There’s currently no way to make a share or a folder Public, like there is with Dropbox, which is why I’m not hosting my school projects there yet. It’s also impossible to create an account with no password, or to link files between accounts. I suppose one could create a “public” account, but everyone would have to know the password as well, making it a little inconvenient.
The Noughmad's Land 