Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. See the manual for a detailed look at it's capabilities.
Unison comes in two flavors:
Unison can sync
For syncing desktop machine and Neo we use the latter. The recommended way to do this is the remote shell method: We start unison or unison-gtk on the desktop PC. The program will connect to the Neo via ssh and start a text-only instance of unison on the Neo to retrieve new files or deltas and to modify files on the Neo.
For this to work, ssh may not output any text itself, because unison parses the first line of console output to determine the version of unison on the remote computer. So we setup ssh for public key authentication:
We need to install the text version of unison on the neo. Since there's no native opkg file available currently, we take the debian package. Extract the file unison-2.27.57 and copy it to /usr/bin on neo. Create a symlink by the name of unison.
A unison configuration on the desktop PC (~/.unison/Openmoko.prf) might look like this
# Unison preferences file label = Syncing Openmoko # the directories on the desktop and on the neo root = /home/user/Openmoko/data root = ssh://root@192.168.0.202//media/mmc4 # common options include Common.opt # Do not compare modification time times = false ########### Music ############## path = music ########### GPS Data ########### path = gps ignore = Path gps/Maps/* ignorenot = Path gps/Maps/OSM ignore = Path gps/log/*
On first execution of unison on the desktop, unison will create hashes for the entire directory tree. This may take a while.
Unison supports various preferences to interactively include programs for comparing and merging files during synchronization (see the manual).