Manage your Ubuntu One account

Yesterday I wrote about the Ubuntu One Music Store (see my article "Ubuntu One Music Store has arrived"). This little feature is starting to drum up a lot of excitement throughout the Linux community. Although this feature is also drumming up a lot of anger from other distribution communities, it is an outstanding new service that is LONG overdue.

Ubuntu One is a great feature...but how is it managed? You can have multiple machines attached to a single account (which means you can sync all your purchased music onto all of your Ubuntu One machines - sweet). The act of adding machines and managing your account is not that much of a challenge - you just have to know where to look. In this article I will show you how to manage your Ubuntu One account.

Installation

On the off chance you are running Ubuntu, and do not have Ubuntu One on your machine, fear not. As of 9.04 you can install Ubuntu One. All you have to do is follow these steps:

1. Open up Synaptic.
2. Search for "ubuntuone" (no quotes).
3. Mark the following for installation: ubuntuone-client, ubuntuone-client-XXX (Where XXX is either rhythmbox or banshee)
4. Let Syanptic pick up the dependencies.
5. Click Apply to install.

You will need to log out and log back in and then you will be ready to go.

Ubuntu One Preferences

From the MeMenu (this is only in 10.4) you can click on your name and then click on the Ubuntu One entry to open up the Ubuntu One preferences. If you are running 9.x you can click on System > Preferences > Ubuntu One to open up the preferences window (you can open it this same way in 10.4 as well).

When you open up the preferences window you will have a simple to use management tool (see Figure 1).  Within this window you will see three tabs, they are:

Account: This gives you basic information about your account as well as the means to upgrade and manage your account.

Devices: This tab shows which devices are attached to your Ubuntu One account and allows you to remove a device if you need. You can not add a device from this tab however. You can limit bandwidth on particular devices if you like.

Service: This tab allows you to enable/disable the various services. The services include Bookmarks (requires an add on for firefox), Broadcast Messages Archive, Contacts, File sync (including music download).

Add a machine

In order to add a machine, click on the Account tab and then click the Manage account link. This action will open a new tab in Firefox where you need to authenticate your account. Once authenticated you will see a new page (see Figure 2) that allows you to view the machines connected to your account. Click on that link and, if the machine you are using is not attached to your Ubuntu One account, you will see a text area to give the machine a name and an Add This Computer button. Do this and that machine will automatically be added and file-syncing will begin. It's that simple.

From that same page you can upgrade your subscription to Ubuntu One. For the 50 Gig upgrade you pay $10.00 USD per month. Not too bad considering you are syncing music as well (2 gigs won't store much music).

Final thoughts

Ubuntu One is well worth the little effort necessary to get it up and running. And although the Ubuntu One Music Store is ruffling some penguin feathers out there, it's still a service long overdue.

Advertisement