Alhamdulillaah, I’ve (finally!) installed Fedora 10 on my laptop, but it’s not been without its bumps.  I cannot blame this on Fedora 10 nor the anything else related to the release.  But, in the end, I don’t have a DVD to install from, only the LiveCD (which I booted from my SD card reader), and that left me without a lot of packages and also without Ext4!  And now, after having copied my Evolution profile directory over, I discovered that the new version does (2.24.1) does not supported the “unmatched” search folder feature which I had come to rely on in recent weeks.  This is a real bummer as it all but nullifies the advantage of using search folders (for me, at least) in Evolution.  Alhamdulillaah, at least there’s a bug report open with one developer sympathizing.  However, a fix for it may not be forthcoming until the next release.

I think the time has come to take a look at Thunderbird again…

Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos.

I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.

Sunset 1

This time-lapse sequence is composed of 900 images, taken with an approximate interval of 5 – 8 seconds (it’s not very precise due to a few factors).  As happened with at least one other sequence, something interesting started to happen just as the sequence finishes…you’ll have to watch the whole thing to find out…

Highlights include seeing the contrails of planes transform into high-altitude cirrus clouds as well as shadows from individual clouds sweeping across the sky!

Bonus points if you can identify the embedded subliminal message about lawn care. 

Lessons learned: Capture more!  If something looks interesting in real-time, then it almost certainly will be more so in time-lapse!

Sunset 2

Possibly my best sequence yet, it is composed of a whopping 1500 images, taken with an approximate interval of 2 – 4 seconds (the setting was 1 “second” in CHDK).  This is cropped to 720p HD resolution after I resized the sequence a bit to make it more manageable.  For an uncropped sequence, see below.

Highlights include very detailed view of cloud structure as well as cloud formation & dissipation.  Additionally, more cloud-shadow streaks are visible.  Finally, there is some interesting stuff happening at sunset that appears to be some very high-level development, such as waves within the clouds.

Lessons learned: Fix the exposure and other settings so that there is a consistent feel throughout the whole sequence, unless that changing exposure settings are intentional (which they are not, in this case, but it’s not so bad, either).

Sunset 2

(VGA resolution)

This is from the same image sequence as above, except the original 4×3 images are resized to VGA (640×480) resolution.  It should be easy to identify where the crop took place (somewhat below the exact middle of the frame, poised just above and between the non-sky parts).

Windy Day 1

Windy Day 2

These two image sequences (Windy Day 1 & 2) are real gems, alhamdulillaah!  I really liked them.  Sadly, they are also the shortest.  And why, might you ask, are they the shortest (and most irregular in length)?  Well, the sequences are titled quite appropriately – they were taken on an exceptionally windy day.  So windy, in fact, that my lightweight plastic tripod (that came more-or-less free with my camera from Newegg) was blown over by the wind…twice (once per sequence, thus the abrupt endings)…with the camera still on it.  The first impact was on concrete.  The second was grass.

Highlights include some stunning sun rays sweeping through the holes in the clouds.

Lessons learned: Have a basic understanding of physics (especially the aspects of mass, force, leverage, and thus, torque) before undertaking photography in averse conditions that lend to beautiful photo ops.  Additionally, should one’s understanding of above-mentioned topics not be sufficient, at least retain the common sense to place the camera in an area where damage from falling would be minimized.

Windy Day 3

Windy Day 4

These last two image sequences were done on a different windy day, but with a heavier tripod (an old, well-built metal one belonging to my father).  There really isn’t as much inspiring about these sequences.  The quality of the images was outstanding, but nothing particularly interesting happened.

Lessons learned: Place the camera in such a way as to minimize unwanted obstructions (in this case, the trees didn’t add much).  Also, a deeper field of view would make for a more interesting shot – more time to see the cloud formations develop and dissipate.

So there you have it!  I’ve been working on these sequences (both making & processing them) all weekend and until today, so I am happy to finally be done with them so I can share them.  Comments most welcome!

Time-lapse sky by Basil Mohamed Gohar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake!

One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts which take the enabled features of your camera and do interesting things with them. One such script enables one to take a sequence of images of a fixed interval over a period of time – i.e., time-lapse photography! So, over the past two days, I’ve gone-ahead and played with this feature a bit by just collecting images from my office window while I diligently “worked”.

Through the script menu, I was able to setup the time-lapse to take one photo every second. As my office is on the 4th floor of large cubic structure in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, I had a nice view that combined parking lot-and-street activity with some nice cloud shows. That both days were signficantly overcast actually proved to make the videos more interesting – so much so that the last image sequence was pointed more towards the sky to capture the natural splendor up above.

Note: All videos are in free and open source Ogg Theora format.  If you do not have a player that supports this already installed, then I recommend the VLC free and open source player.  Most users of a GNU/Linux or other *nix-based systems will probably not need anything special to player, so this note is mostly for Windows users.

Time-lapse view from my office window by Basil Mohamed Gohar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

work-window-time-lapse-1

This was my first image sequence out of my office window. The white balance is really off, unfortunately, because I didn’t attempt to adjust it at all. Subsequently, the entire image sequence has a color hue due to the tinting of the office building’s windows.

work-window-time-lapse-2

My second image sequence came out a little better with regards to color, because I set the white balance to “overcast”. This is still not as accurate as it could be, however.

work-window-time-lapse-3

The third image sequence is the longest, and first one from the second day. This is a sequence of 600 images in total! I manually adjusted the white balance for this and the next sequence, and as such, the color appear much more natural & realistic in these two sequences.

work-window-time-lapse-4

The last & final image sequence for this batch was really just something I did without giving it much thought. Amazingly enough, it turned-out to be the most interesting until the end when it gets cut off (due to lack of space on my SD card) – the direction of the clouds began to change! This sequence in particular encourages me to try to stake-out a day with excellent cloud activity and just setup the camera to capture as long a sequence as is sane.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this post and these clips as much as I did making & manipulating them. I’ll make another post explaining how I captured the images & converted them into videos. Feel free to post comments and/or questions should you have any.

Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but I’m already amazingly pleased with what I can do so far that I was unable to do prior to this.

Amongst its amazing features includes the ability to save images to a RAW format, full control over shutter speed & exposure settings, fine-grained control over video quality settings, HDR photography, and an amazing BASIC-based scripting language that enables, among other things, time-lapse photography (examples in an upcoming post, in shaaʾ Allaah).

Expect myriad future posts relating to images & videos I’ve been able to capture with these new features, especially in combination with

Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9′s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for that), or a plethora of other things. So, in reality, Fedora 9′s awesomeness is a celebration of Free & Open-Source software and its universal community.

The following is pretty-much ripped from the wiki. The witty banter is added by me. Also, I know I’m not the first (actually, I hope I’m quite close to the last) to have done one of these things. What follows are the features that I consider to be cool and important, but this list is obviously by no means exhaustive or even appropriately representative of Fedora 9. It’s simply a list of what I think will make Fedora 9 so awesome, in shaaʾ Allaah.

Okay, that should be enough flame retardant for now…onwards!

Unified Dictionary Support

This feature is really nice because I tend to use words that aren’t in the stock dictionaries of Pidgin, Firefox, or OpenOffice.org, including transliterations of Arabic that I frequently throw into the mix (already, above, there are two examples). So, I frequently have to add these customized spellings and/or rarer words (or just plain preferred spellings) to the existing dictionaries numerous times. Fedora 9 now unifies these dictionaries so I should, technically, need only one. Awesome!

Ext4 Filesystem Support

Ext4 is the successor to the successful stable ext3 filesystem. Personally, I’ve been using this on both a fresh install of the Fedora 9 Beta and Preview releases, and I have not had any problems. On top of that, I have actually seen some significant performance enhancements, particularly when dealing with both very large as well as large numbers of files. Of course, ext4 has a laundry list of features to it, so don’t just take it from me, check it out!

Note: As the Ext4 filesystem is not nearly as long-in-the-tooth as ext3, you may consider not using it if you have only one copy of data on the filesystem. I feel comfortable and confident about using it for myself, but as people tend to be very conservative when it comes to their choice of filesystems for good reasons, just consider reading-up on it before you commit to it. And when you do, you’ll probably also think it’s awesome!

Firefox 3

Firefox has long been the poster child for the positive impact that a free and open source model can have on software. Taking the world by storm, Firefox has given a good knock to the stalwart of the Internet Age, Internet Explorer 6, and has driven innovation on the Web to new heights, not the least of which is driving Microsoft into releasing newer versions of Internet Explorer at a previously unheard of pace just to keep up with the pace of the Web.

Firefox 3 delivers yet another knock-out blow with amazingly enhanced performance (especially under GNU/Linux), excellent features (like the…wait for it…AwesomeBar…), and all-around slickness such as better cross-platform native integration (don’t think about the logic of that for too long…it’s good, trust me…).

It seems like Firefox is still in Beta for now, but as I’ve been using Firefox since version 0.7, I’ve grown accustomed to the stability that comes with the positive & productive attitude of release early, release often.

(Mandatory “awesome” reference can be found two paragraphs above.)

Gvfs

One of the beauties that Gnome has brought for us is the outstandingly flexibly and featureful Gvfs. Continuing in Gnome’s tradition of just pushing forward to improve the desktop experience, Gvfs offers a new virtual filesystem interface that allows amazingly easy & flexibly file-level access to myriad new platforms, be they of a network, device, or other type of nature. Read the link to the Gnome website for specifics about this nifty new feature.

jigdo

As one of the mirrors of the Fedora Unity Re-Spin project, I’m sort of proud of this one, even though, aside from hosting, all I’ve really done is impeded the progress of releases by asking inane questions at inappropriate times (note to self: check release schedules before hounding people for assistance). It is largely through the work of the fine folks at Fedora Unity that jigdo has now become a mainstay in the Fedora distribution model.

So why should anyone bother with jigdo when there’s already BitTorrent? I used to wonder the same thing, but then I used jigdo for the first time. To vastly over simplify it, with Jigdo, one need only download the bits they are lacking in order to get a full ISO, be it DVD or CD. So, if you already have a Fedora 9 Beta or Preview release, using Jigdo, you’d need only download the packages that have been updated since then.

Contrast this with BitTorrent, where one would need to download the entire ISO, regardless of what bits you may already have of a previous release. Yes, BitTorrent is peer-to-peer and jigdo isn’t (at least, not yet?), but you still have to download the whole 3+GB worth before you have something to install. Jigdo can save you a lot of bandwidth if you already have a previous release available, whether as an ISO file or burnt directly on a disc.

On top of that, if used intelligently, a widespread adoption of jigdo as a distribution method would also alleviate the burden of hosts from having to hold large ISO files which are really just composed of myriad packages already present on the mirror. As a host myself, I think that is just awesome!

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Jigdo for getting Fedora, check out Fedora Unity Jigdo howto.

KDE4

Although I do not use the KDE aside from a few choice apps, I think it would be rather rude and inappropriate to neglect the awesome efforts of the Fedora KFE SIG in making Fedora 9 the first major distribution release to feature KDE4

As I am not as familiar with this awesomeum as I am others, I will leave the absorption of the full details as an exercise for the reader (note: their release annoucement page is…yes, that’s right…awesome…).

PackageKit

It has been called the OPMtRTA (perhaps only by me). I’ll admit that PK has had it’s growing pains, but I have to say, Richard Hughes (and anyone else?) has done an awesome job pulling this one together. I think this is something that necessarily will have to continue to evolve as the scope of PackageKit is just amazing. How far it’s come is even more so, and I am really looking forward to seeing where it goes and what innovative solutions are found for the plethora of problems present with package procurement (okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch, I know…).

I would like to take this time to say that Richard has one of the fastest turnaround-times I’ve seen in any kind of a project, whether it is related to bugs, features, or implementation. And, given the amount of heat that’s been thrown his way, his demeanor has always been calm, collected, and courteous (that one was better, wasn’t it?).

100% Free and Open Source

This isn’t new…it’s always been there. Yes, Fedora, by directed and intentional policy, is a 100% Free and Open Source GNU/Linux distribution. While it is possible to get non-free bits into it, you’ll not find one shipped with it. I think this is, by far, the greatest feature of Fedora (at least, as an OS – I consider the community to be the best part of Fedora in general). Take us back a decade or two, and who would have thought that such a functional and polished product could exist free from the enslaving shackles of proprietary softare? Alhamdulillaah!

So, there you have it! A quick view of the upcoming Fedora 9! I’ll be doing my best to mirror the torrents of Fedora, both the i386 and x86_64 releases, in shaa Allaah. Please feel free to share your own comments and experiences with Fedora 9 and/or free-and-open-source software in general!

I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) – while an IEEE 1394 link is definitely fast, any tape-based camcorder usually only transfers the video at regular playing speeds by actually playing the video.

Having said that, here are a few that have caught my eye:

• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/519149-REG/Sanyo_VPC_HD1000BK_Xacti_HD1000_HD_Camcorder.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/521864-REG/Panasonic_HDC_SD5BNDL_HDC_SD5_AVCHD_Digital_Camcorder.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/539291-REG/Canon_2708B001_VIXIA_HF_100_AVCHD_Flash.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537788-REG/JVC_GZ_HD5_GZ_HD5_60GB_HD_Everio.html
• http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537789-REG/JVC_GZ_HD6_GZ_HD6_120GB_HD_Everio.html

The important issue, of course, is how easy is it to work with the video once it’s recorded.  Most of the video formats are MPEG-4-based, usually the controversial AVCHD.  There are some advantages & disadvantages, of course, but ffmpeg really helps with most of the issues.  I’ve been playing a lot with it (ffmpeg) this past week, and the sheer flexibility of it is astounding.  I think the woes of multimedia flexibility under free operating systems is slowly going away, as even the GUI applications (avidemux, PiTiVi, Kino, etc.) are at a level of refinement I wouldn’t have expected.

Naturally, I am loath to use nonfree versus free solutions, so I am pleased to let you know that there are many free software codecs available through ffmpeg – that is the topic for another article, perhaps.

Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m really excited to dive into open-source content creation!

Updated with relevant linking and a few spelling fixes.

Introduction

Alhamdulillaah, a few months back, I successfully wrapped-up the audio recording & production project for the Texas Dawah Convention 2007. This was clearly one of the most ambitious projects in which I’ve been involved in my life, especially given the degree of responsibility I was given and the amount of work I had to do.

The project for me was a great learning experience on numerous fronts – management, business, technology, work ethic, and team work are amongst a few of them. If it weren’t for the great support I received from my partner & friend (I’ll only mention him if he wants me to – knowing him, he probably would prefer I don’t by default), then the work would have never happened and would have ended-up a terrible flop.

Please read on if you’re interested in knowing the history of how I became involved with this project, how it was executed, some of the challenges I faced during it, and finally, and a part of which I am very proud, how I completed almost exclusively using free (as in freedom) software, particular that which comes with Fedora.

Background

I have long had a passion for audio – be it with regards to editing, recording, production, or even creation. And, given my other passion for Islamic education, it should come as no surprise that I like to work on recording, producing, and making-available quality Islamic recordings for the benefit of everyone. Thus, ever since I first attended the Texas Dawah Convention, I knew that I wanted to be involved, at least with the audio aspect. This desire became even stronger as the Convention has had some troubles make the recordings from the previous years widely available.

The Convention itself is outstanding, and I strongly encourage everyone to attend it if you can – whether or not you are Muslim, it provides an excellent place where someone can learn about the proper understanding of Islam free from extremism, misguidance, and distortion. Naturally, those are based on my own opinions, and everyone is entitled to their own about whatever they like, I suppose…regardless, it is held every year in late December. Details can usually be found on their website as Winter approaches.

First Contact

Back to the point, I had a golden opportunity to pursue the desire to become more involved with the Convention itself. It just so happened that Shaykh Waleed Basyouni, the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, was holding an AlMaghrib Institute seminar (Rays of Faith) in Columbus, Ohio (Qabeelat Hayl). As I was the coordinator for the class, I was blessed with extra time with the shaykh, so I approached him with a bold proposal. Being that he was the director of the Texas Dawah Convention, I proposed to him to hand over audio recording & production entirely to me for the then upcoming convention. I knew it was more-or-less a shot in the dark, but he respectfully listened to me in full, giving me more than a generous portion of his time given that he was heading back home soon afterward.

Pleasantly enough, and after a series of e-mails & phone conversations, Shaykh Waleed took me up on my proposal, which I was wisely discussing as a prospect with a close friend & future partner the whole time. As such, we were mentally prepared with the idea that we’d have actual work to do during the convention.

Preparations

As much as one prepares for a task, it’s amazing how many aspects can still come up and leave one shaken and struggling to stay standing. To be honest, it is in management of this kind – preparing for the logistics of something hands-on – that I tend to be rather weak. Alhamdulillaah, my friend and business partner came to the rescue and prepared, more or less, the entire plan for how the work needed to be broken-up, divided, and thus organized so that it could be managed in a reasonable way. Without his sheets, plans, and equipment labeling, the task would have been an operational nightmare.

Part of our charter for the audio work was to purchase a variety of recording equipment, most of which would be used for the many coming years, in shaaʾ Allaah. Consequently, once again, my friend showcased his business prowess, and was able to secure the best pricing for the majority of the equipment and supplies we needed. The biggest challenge here was my procrastination and that of others, through miscommunication, which resulted in us spending way more money than necessary for some basic items (e.g., CDs, labels, and some equipment).

Showtime!

Once we got to the site, we had very little time really to spend with the volunteers we’d be given to be our runners. It was somewhat of a challenge to divide the work up amongst them – we had 8 total (a 9th came in midway through the convention, alhamdulillaah). Each had their own level of skills, be it technical or otherwise, that we had to balance and find out. What was most troubling to me was that, despite the sheer amount of work involved, frequently the volunteers found themselves without anything to do simply because we didn’t know how best to divide up the work. Again, and I will continue pointing this out through the post, my partner-friend really took to managing the volunteers and ensuring they were kept reasonably busy with productive things while also ensuring they weren’t overworked and could attend the parts of the convention their really wanted to.

To their credit, the volunteers, in general, all performed outstandingly, maa shaaʾ Allaah walhamdulillaah. Given that there were three straight days of seminars, sometimes 6 at the same time, the fact that we had only a few really major mistakes (including one lecture that was a complete write off, unfortunately) is really a testament to their hard work and willingness to pull through some tough schedules we’d made for them. Jazaakum Allaahu khayr!

To Be Continued…

While this wraps-up the general procedure for everything, I have intentionally left the technical side out as I am going to focus on that in a dedicated post, including possibly mentioning a near disaster that was narrowly avoided due to the Mercy of Allaah in answering my supplications. See you then!

Alhamdulillaah, the Fedora 9 Preview has been released to the torrents! You can grab ‘em here:

http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

I’m seeding (well, that’ll be entirely true in a couple of hours) the x86_64 DVD images on both of my servers now, so there’s approximately 30Mbit/s of extra bandwidth just for those. I intend on leaving them running until the download rates creep down. This is more of a space issue than one of bandwidth, as both servers only have an 80GB hard drive, and they are themselves loaded with

I’ve been running rawhide from the Beta image for a few weeks now, and I really like it. I will probably do a fresh install from the Preview images so I can help in squishing any release-blocking bugs without the cruft from a previous install.

Anyone truly lazy and doesn’t want to do a torrent download can grab the image off of my server as long as it’s there, once the download has finished (in approximately one hour after this posting was made):

http://hidayahonline.org/~abu_hurayrah/Fedora-9-Preview-x86_64-DVD/

(That’s actually what I’m going to be doing myself once I get home later tonight, in shaaʾ Allaah…)

Update: The torrents have finished downloading and both are seeding.  The entire DVD ISO image should be downloadable from the above link.

[basil.gohar@escapdv01 ~]$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

265 ll

210 cd

101 time

86 dbrestore

79 exit

28 su

24 vi

18 ssh

17 ping

16 less

“dbrestore” is an alias for a script I use to…well..restore DBs.  One that is not on here that was the first time I ran the script is my “search” alias, which is a wrapper for find & grep that searches the contents of PHP files (since that’s what I spend all day working on).

I’ve even added a GNOME category.  Maybe after this I’ll start posting more Fedora- & GNOME-related topics, and increase my chances of getting listed in the planets…

I’ll update with my home laptop & PC results after I get home tonight, in shaaʾ Allaah (notice I’m using “ʾ” to mark an Arabic hamzah in my transliteration…more on that later…in shaaʾ Allaah…;) )

I’m trying out the gnome-blog utility again inside of Fedora 8. I had a bit of a challenge at first because when I tried to input my blog URL, it was trying to force the directory to be */wordpress/, which is not how my blog is setup. Alhamdulillaah, once I figured-out I had to append the xmlrpc.php (not xml-rpc.php, like I was trying at first), it stopped trying to force my hand.

Oh, and it seems the word “blog” is still not included in whatever dictionary gnome-blog uses for spell-checking (a nice feature, I might add).

If this works out, then it will be a lot easier to update my blog while I’m at work, where I get most of my bloggy thoughts, rather than waiting until I get home, when I am usually too tired or busy to do anything. This is aside from the fact that there are a lot few formatting options available, but we’ll survive.

As an important note, I tried Drivel after I didn’t succeed at first with gnome-blog, and it didn’t support spaces in usernames. It seems to be related to the fact that it uses the username as part of a key (I guess for GConf?). I guess that’s an example of a poor design choice…

Let’s see what happens…

Without going into too many details, in order to present a filesystem to the user and, in general, most applications, information about files (file names, sizes, permissions, and general metadata) along with the actual file data is needed. SSH itself is perfectly capable of handling both. In fact, sftp (secure ftp), which utilizes SSH, is quite possibly the third most popular general file transfer protocal after HTTP and FTP. As the requiste information necessary for proper filesystem access is readily available through SSH, all that is needed to enable secure, transparent filesystem access to remote locations is a way to tie these methods together with the kernel’s filesystem routines. This is where FUSE comes in to play.

Traditionally, in Linux, due to its monolithic design, filesystem functions have been a component of the kernel. FUSE flips this idea on its head. As it’s full name, Filesystem in Userspace, explicitly exclaims, FUSE places the filesystem routines within userspace as opposed to kernelspace. As a result, adding support for disparate filesystems is as simple as installing the routines for them. There is no need to recompile the kernel or anything of the sort. It is as simple an operation as loading up a user application such as Firefox. As a result, FUSE has been used for an unbelievably large number of filesystem implementations of almost every possible type.

Now that we understand the basic premise of FUSE, it shouldn’t be that great of a jump to understand how fuse-sshfs works. Take one part ssh, one part fuse, a dash of freedom, and voilà – we have a remote filesystem location mounted as a local resource. All filesystem operations and transfers are securely encrypted.

For an example of how flexible this is, I am currently listening to this file directly from the server’s filesystem via fuse-sshfs. Though I am physically streaming the file over the Internet, Audacious sees the file as a local resource. fuse-sshfs takes care of all filesystem resources. While there are obvious performance considerations with regards to bandwidth and latency, those would be present with any realtime solution providing a similar service. For simple operations such as fetching directory listings, opening individual files, and even copy files to-and-from the remote system, you will likely see performance within the acceptable range of a normal computing session.

“Enough, Basil! Tell me how to do it already!”

Alright, alright. Brace yourself for the most complicated part of this article.

First, if you don’t have the FUSE library installed, download and install it. It’s a simple

yum install fuse-sshfs

On systems with yum support (e.g., Fedora)

You can download the sources from the FUSE website and compile & install them with the following commands (download and extract the files first):

./configure
make
make install

Likewise, do the same for the fuse-sshfs package

./configure
make
make install

With FUSE and fuse-sshfs now installed, you mount the remote location with the following command:

sshfs hostname: mountpoint

So, for example, let’s say you want to mount the directory /home/my.remote.username located on the server www.example.com. Additionally, you’d like to mount it at the location ~/my.remote.username@example.com. The command would look akin to this (depending on how your system implements user home directories – my assumption is Fedora Core 6):

sshfs my.remote.username@example.com:/home/my.remote.username /home/my.local.username/my.username@example.com

Can it get anymore difficult? Yes, if you’re running SSH on a differnet port, just pass the port number as the parameter to the -p argument prior to the hostname portion:

sshfs -p 1234 my.remote.username@example.com:/home/my.remote.username /home/my.local.username/my.username@example.com

There is a host of other options that are available for configuration. A standard sshfs -h call will show you what’s available.

There is one caveat I discovered using fuse-sshfs, at least on Fedora Core 6 on my laptop and at work (laptop is 32bit, work is dual-core 64bit). The sshfs binaries are, by default, given execute permissions only to the owner and the group – neither of whom are you by default (owner is root, group is fuse). This can be resolved by adding yourself to the fuse group. Look up how to do that, because it may be different on your system. With Fedora Core 6, it’s a simple call to the Users and Groups applet under the “Administration” section of the “System” menu.

Another issue to keep in mind is that if you mount a subdirectory (as we have in the example0, then you cannot have access to any directories above (e.g., the home directory). You only have access to the directory which you’ve mount, and those below it. Additionally, I noticed strange behavior with symlinks – it appears they are not derefenced and then corrected for the local system, so they are likely not to work correctly.

Aside from those two major issues, fuse-sshfs has amazed from the moment I tried it out, and I am finding it more-and-more useful as I try it different contexts. If I discover anything else interesting, good or bad, I will either update this post or share it within a comment. I invite anyone else that tries it to do the same. If anyone has any questions or problems, feel free to post, and if I know the answer, I’ll try to offer a solution.