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SparkleShare is an open source cloud collaboration/synchronization tool that uses Git under the hood and can be used with your own Git repository or with services such as BitBucket, GitHub, Gitorious and Plan.io.

sparkleshare

The application features file synchronization, version control, client side encryption and more and is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. According to its homepage, SparkleShare and is great for frequently changing project files like text, office documents and so on, but not for large music/photo collections, large binary files hat change often and so on (because it uses Git which doesn't handle binaries very well).

A new SparkleShare version has been released recently: 1.2.0, which includes mostly bug fixes, such as:
  • Fixes to the invite feature, now works when SparkleShare isn't running yet;
  • Fix some interface logic in Add dialog;
  • Fix some inaccurate sync state messages in the status icon;
  • Fix conflict when running when TortoiseGit is installed;
  • Fix crash when user cancels initial project download;
  • Fix Continue button not enabling when entering encryption password;
  • Fix Planio plugin name showing up as Gitorious on Linux;
  • Show download speed on initial project add.


Install SparkleShare in Ubuntu


SparkleShare is available in the official Ubuntu repositories, but it hasn't been updated in a while (for instance, the current version in Ubuntu Saucy is 0.9) so to install the latest version, you can use an unofficial PPA. You'll also have to add the Git-core PPA, on which the SparkleShare PPA depend on.

To add the required PPAs and install the latest SparkleShare in Ubuntu 13.04, 12.10 or 12.04, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rebuntu16/sparkleshare+unofficial
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sparkleshare

After SparkleShare has been installed successfully, start it and from the tray/appindicator select SparkleShare > Add hosted project and then select if you want to use your own server or BitBucket, GitHub, Gitorious or Planio:

sparkleshare

For other Linux distributions, Windows or Mac OS X, download SparkleShare from its website.