Morning, all.
Now; before I go any further, let me state, here & now, that this thread is in no way 'finding fault' with the sterling work both Mikeb and Fredx181 have put in with their respective DropBox & GoogleDriveGUI Puppy clients. I use Fred's GDriveGUI regularly; it's an excellent way to quickly access files/folders in your account.....and both are suitably 'light-weight' (and thus ideal for Puppians running elderly, low-resource hardware, since it keeps your data in 'the cloud', accessing it locally only when you want it). Works fine for the old Dell lappie; don't want to stress-out that P4 too much, do we?
All credit to both of them.
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I came across O-Drive a few hours ago, mooching around OMG!Ubuntu!; it's one of several sites I regularly 'trawl' in search of inspiration/news of new app releases for the Ubuntu 'ecosphere'.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/02/odr ... nux-client
It's what I think of as a more 'traditonal' Google Drive client (like the official DropBox one), which keeps a 'mirror' image of your Drive contents locally on your machine, and 'syncs' between them at regular intervals. This is fine for those of you running Puppy on more powerful hardware, with large amounts of local storage.....which is definitely required if, like me, you have several GB of stuff on your Drive.
'Drive' clients for Linux have always been 'unofficial', since Google don't produce a version for those of us who inhabit 'the dark side'.....
So this is why I keep trawling these kinds of sites; you never know what may suddenly materialize on the scene.---------------------------------------
O-Drive is available as an AppImage - one of my favourite formats for ease-of-use - although it is (like so much new stuff these days) only available as 64-bit. You can download it from here:-
https://github.com/liberodark/ODrive/releases/tag/0.2.0
It's also available as a .deb file; some of you may prefer this to the AppImage. Haven't tried this, so I can't comment on whether it works or not. Probably does.
When O-Drive fires up, it places a distinctive orange/yellow G-Drive icon in JWM's tray 'notification area'. The simple GUI, accessed by rt-clicking the icon and selecting 'Preferences', looks like this:-
Select your a/c, which brings up the usual, Google authentication screen which many of you will be familiar with, and allows you to sign-in. Then you select the directory where you want to store your 'local' data. If, like me, you have large amounts (several GB-worth), it's best to create this on a drive/partition where you've got plenty of space, then sym-link it into /root. That way, of course, it's outside of 'Puppy-space'.
Finally, you hit the large blue 'Synchronize' button, bottom right. Initially, this process will take quite some time, since it's downloading a copy of the contents of your drive. 2-3 hours is quite possible, depending on your ISP's download speeds.
You may, like me, encounter a few false-starts. It might come up with the message 'Error; socket hang-up'. Don't fret about this; just hit the 'Synchronize' button again, and take another crack at it. It all behaved itself on the second attempt, and took around 2 hours, 20 minutes to complete. Watching it happen on gKrellM while it was syncing, nothing seemed to happen for several minutes.....then, suddenly, it was as if a switch had been thrown, and it started downloading at, for me, a steady 1.3 MB/s. And it seems to 'sync' in bursts; it's not continuous by any means, once started.
Once completed, however, it all appears to be fine. If you move anything into the Drive directory, watching the Drive in your browser, it syncs within a matter of seconds. I don't think there's any way you can alter these sync 'refreshes; I guess that's all controlled from Google's end.
Whenever your local directory is syncing with its cloud counterpart, a wee red symbol will show on the tray icon, letting you know what's happening.
The tray icon's rt-clk Menu also lets you set this to start at boot time. I don't yet know whether this works; I haven't yet re-booted since firing it up for the first time. I've sym-linked the AppImage into /root/Startup; if I get two instances of this running when I next boot into Xenial, I shall know that it does. The app creates a config directory at /root/.config/odrive, so.....we shall see.
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I'm currently trialling this in XenialPup64 7.5, and, so far, it's working very well. I'm guessing you can do the usual trick of 'sharing' an app from a remote location between Puppies by sym-linking the appropriate bits into the appropriate places in each Pup. Tomorrow I shall see if I can get this working in Bionicpup64 too. Time will tell.
I know the Electron 'framework' isn't to everybody's taste, being based as it is around the Chromium browser's 'Blink' engine; whenever you run any Electron-based app, AppImage or otherwise, you're essentially running another instance of Chromium. These aren't such a good idea if you're RAM-challenged.....but it's like I always say; I like to let the community know about as many alternatives as possible. Choice is a good thing..!
Enjoy!
Mike.
