File Synchronization with Unison

Ok, am trying the latest version of "Unison" today. Will tell you how it goes. Unison is another file synchronization program. I say another one because after about a week of this I'm already tired of trying different file synchronization programs.

When I was in the windows world I used to use a couple of programs depending on whether I was doing an automated sync or whether I just wanted to synchronize a branch of my directory structure. For the former I used something called SmartSync Pro which is a great program that I highly recommend if you use Windows. About a decade ago I have found it and finished testing it after two or three weeks of concerted searching and testing.

Ok, so now I've switched to Linux and it's time for me to do the same two to three weeks of concerted testing. I feel "too old" to be spending all of this time and energy doing this sort of thing again.  But here I am on the second week (I'm measuring this in man hours).

One of the easiest way to install Unison (in Ubuntu) is by starting up your command prompt and copy and paste "sudo apt-get install unison unison-gtk". It'll prompt you for your password and all you have to do is wait for it to finish.

However if you are like me and you want to make sure you don't miss out on any new features you can use one of the more recent versions but installing it is a little more work. Just follow these steps:

1) copy and past this at that same command prompt (without the quotes):
"sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) subversion ocaml liblablgtk2-ocaml-dev"
     * Now wait a while. This is installing several things that Unison uses to work. You might even have to run this overnight if you get a connection to a slow server.

2) Type (or copy/paste) each of the lines in the box below. Notes: after executing the "make" command (Ignore error about etags). And after executing the "make UISTYLE=text" command be sure to also (Ignore error about etags).

Download and Install Unison SVN sources

Code:

cd ~
mkdir Source
cd Source
svn co https://webdav.seas.upenn.edu/svn/unison/trunk unison
cd unison/src
make
mv unison unison-gtk
make clean
make UISTYLE=text (Ignore error about etags)

sudo cp unison unison-gtk /usr/bin

The unison svn binaries should now be installed in /usr/bin. To test and see the currently installed unison version

Code:

$ unison-gtk -version<br />unison version 2.43.16<br /><br />$ unison -version<br />unison version 2.43.16

The unison console based version should always be used on the server. The unison-gtk GUI or unison text version may be used as the client.

Thanks to "kevdog" for the instructions that got me where I needed to get. I hope to get around to an actual review of Unison later.