Tutorial: How to create your own cloud with Linux

How to create your own cloud with LinuxWe've prodded cloud computing from a technical point of view several times but, from a user's perspective, it's a lot more than your always-available hard drive on the internet. It's omnipresent across platforms and, with the proliferation of smartphones, even devices. Apple created a lot of buzz when it announced its iCloud service earlier this year. It's designed to enable users to store content so it's accessible from all of their devices. Guess what? With Linux you can do it better. In the following article we'll show you how to harness the power of the cloud to access all types of data stored on remote services on your devices - from Chrome on your office laptop running Ubuntu, to Firefox on your Fedora desktop at home, to your Android mobile phone. And while Apple's iCloud is limited, in that it's for users of Apple's products, we'll look at services that cater for all the three major desktops, namely Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. In the true spirit of open source, we'll also look at options that let you create your own cloud to share pictures with friends and family, stream music to your devices or keep your calendars in sync, whether you modified them in the office or at home. At the end of it all, you'll be able to sync bookmarks and carry your browser passwords from your netbook at home, to the laptop in your office, to a lunch meeting on your Android phone. We'll show you how you can send and receive email on any device from all your accounts, whether on a webmail service or hosted on your own server, and always have your calendars and contacts with you. We'll also cover tools that enable you to take pictures with your Android phone and instantly share them on a website such as Flickr, or a social network like Facebook, or upload them to your own cloud. We'll even show you how to buy music from your Linux desktop and stream it onto your mobile phone. That's how you make cloud computing work for you.