I guess many people were asking for something akin to Windows Skydrive. Ubuntu recently rolled out ubuntu one, an OS integrated online storage space.
And the first impression - its annoyingly simple to use. Once you are through with the two-click installation, you are left with just a “Congratulations” message. First thing any linux user does is, right click the taskbar applet to check for Preferences. Well? Sorry folks, nothing to tweak around with. Disappointing :(
Next thing, you click on the taskbar icon and it opens up an Ubuntu One folder on your home drive. With some relief, you then proceed to examine the folder for some sort of Nautilus extension to synchronize the drive. Nothing! With mounting suspecion, you copy some files into it. Bloody hell! Ubuntu One kicks into action staring synchronizing your drive.
Good stuff: It optimizes on the bandwidth idle times to ulpoad the content in a very transparent way (means, over a slow connection you will not feel much of a drop in your surfing speed)
Bad stuff: It keeps spinning my hard drive like crazy. I hope they read blocks into memory, work off that and leave my hard drive alone! And we need a Preferences menu, to specify the location of the synchronized drive and tweak around with bandwidth shaping.
Verdict: The product is in its beta. If you are one Jaunty or Karmic (God bless you), what are you waiting for? And oh, the free version gives you 2 GB.
Update: What I thought to be heavy harddisk read was a bug in the 2.6.28 kernel around cpu fan speed control, causing the temperature to rise.