[Digikam-users] Re: Help. My wife demands access to our images. (Windows, network access, multi user ALSO NAS)

[Graham Lambert]

Yet another idea ... have you considered setting up an Xserver on the
windows system? Xming (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/)
advertises that it will work on Windows 7. Using an Xserver does create
quite a bit of network trafffic but it will give you access to the Linux
machine as if you were a user using an xsession directly - you are
effectively adding a remote display to your Linux (linux must be set up
to allow an xdmcp connect).

Advantages
- you do not have to teach Linux; it just becomes a desktop in a window
on your wife's machine, on which she will only need to click DK ... she
will have to log in but there is no booting involved
- you are not running a virtual machine on windows as it is not the
windows machine you are using, but just a 'view port' so there is no
remote DK database synchronisation to worry about
- you do not have to move the photo album via the USB port, it will stay
on Linux with the added safety that you can determine the viewing
directories (this is not control but safety)
- samba is not involved
- no synchronisation problems (DK on Windows is not as up to date as DK
on Linux and so might not sync, and you would have to keep both versions
up to date)
- safe because the windows machine is a remote terminal. You can control
the amount of behaviour available - e.g. no root access
- when you shut down, the window on you're wife's machine will close
automatically - but she will (should) receive a warning first

Disadvantages
- depending on your setup your wife might notice a deterioration in
speed as all the graphics are run via the network (every mouse movement
and every keyboard or mouse keypress)
- setting up can be a fiddle or a huge learning experience if you are
not used to it or it doesn't go right first time

If you have enough excess power and memory on the windows machine to
easily run the graphics of a remote DK or Gimp session you may consider
running a linux live CD and making an xdmcp connect from that. Most of
the well known live releases offer a xserver capability - you find it at
the logon menu. (this does mean your wife learning a bit of Unix though)

It just depends on whether you want the concurrent access or not, but it
might be worth a try.

GL


On 10/12/10 19:39, JD Rogers wrote:
>
>     >  I have a similar problem (but without the windows bit).
>     > I went with removable media, so it should be manageable..
>
>     Tell me more.
>
>
> Well, I have a 1TB usb drive which is my 'primary' storage of albums
> (I mirror it occasionally with rsync onto a second 1TB drive that
> stays in a different location). I configured digikam to keep the
> database in the photo directory on the usb drive with the idea that my
> wife could use the same db and then when either of us wanted to access
> the photos, we plug in the usb drive to either of our laptops and
> everything should be fine.
>
> That was the plan. In practice, I haven't really tried it much to see
> what kind of problems might come up, but she do some browsing without
> digikam using nautilus and that went ok. I also keep as much info
> (tags, etc.) in the photo metadata, so rebuilding a digikam database
> should be no problem.
>
> As Jim said, I think it should be ok, especially if she's not moving
> the directories around. Read-only should be fine, and if she wants to
> do editing, you could have her copy/save to a seperate dir (which is
> good idea regardless of who is writing changes).
>
>     Does each computer then have its own database or does the database sit
>     on the removable drive ?
>
>
> That was what I was thinking would be the advantage of the db on the
> drive rather than local, but hopefully someone else weighs in with
> actually experience on the pros and cons of doing that.
>  
>
>     I'm thinking of doing something is network storage at the same
>     time.  I
>     should have added NAS into the subject line.  Actually, I just did.
>
>     Thanks !
>
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