Wed, 23 Apr 2008

Wuala

Today, after some weeks of impatience, I finally received an e-mail inviting me to be an "early adopter" of the alpha version of Wuala. Wuala is an application for different operating systems which makes storing and sharing files and folders over the internet quite easy. The idea is basically to trade some space on one's own HDD for space on other people's computers, but even without this you get 1 GB from Wuala. All files are encrypted in order to protect them from people who haven't been authorised to access them by their owner.

"After a quick download, Wuala is ready." In Windows XP, I found this to be the case - not quite in Linux, though. Apart from some packages (portmap, nfs-common and a few dependencies) I had to install, which are mentioned in a Readme file, and adding a line to my fstab, I also had to get a certain version of Java (sun-java6-jre) and finally copy a file into a different directory; this I only learned after searching the Wuala forum for the error messages I had got. Still, this is just the amount of trial and error which is normal for Linux (and is part of the fun!) - and so far Wuala is only an alpha version.

Once it works it's great. Very useful, very convenient, very easy to use, very fast. I'm impressed.

Posted on 23 Apr 2008 at 22:35 in /technology/internet. -- Permalink