Why?

The project that we mostly spend time on is ownCloud. Daniel stumbled across it in the beginning of year 2013, and the reason was that he was fed up with Dropbox and their control with NSA. Another thing was that he didn’t own his files himself, Dropbox was a part of it – and that didn’t feel good. Daniel wanted a solution where he could host his own cloud service and when he found ownCloud he fell in love. Try it out yourself here: http://demo.owncloud.org/

A lot of POSSIBILITIES

ownCloud has it all, and – it’s open source. Everybody can join the development. Take Daniel for example – from a beginner to becoming one of the members in the ownCloud designteam on GitHub.  ownCloud is not just about file sharing capabilities but it have also an app store where users and developers can make their own apps, which means there are plenty of alternatives that you can add to your setup. Just have a look and you will see.

The community

Another thing that’s nice with ownCloud is the community. People who help out – making it better, and improves ownCloud even more. If you want to help out reporting bugs you should sign up on GitHub. Or if you want to help with translation you should join Transifex.

Different user cases

The ownCloud application itself doesn’t take more than  ~120MB on your hard drive. And depending on what your purpose is (heavy using or not) you will need different amount of RAM, HDD and CPU.

Here is a good article by Frank Karlitschek regarding scaleability.

Daniel’s Setup

Daniel wanted to build a machine that he could use both as an HTPC, ownCloud server, WordPress server and to play games with, all at the same time. Yes, it had to be quite powerful.

Daniel has built computers before but this was a bit complex to him, especially because he didn’t know anything about Linux. The closest he had come to working with Linux was when he played around with DOS before Windows came, back in the -90s. After a few hours of using Google, he found that the easiest way would be to run Linux on a VM with Windows as host.

It was a struggle to get ownCloud working in the beginning, mostly because his lack of skills in Linux and VMs. he spent a lot of hours on just figuring out commands and stuff in Linux, and what Apache, MySQL and stuff were. Daniel was a total newbie in this areas. His previous expertise was building computers. All of these other things where new to him. But after a while you learn. And after alot of mistakes you learn even more. Anyway, it always ends with success. Nowadays the server runs smooth. It hosts ownCloud and serveral other Worpress sites, at the same time it’s powerful enough to be used for gaming as well. Mission success!

Please take a look at the links above to find more information, and check this out:

– Manual installation guide
– Pre-configured ownCloud VM