Ubuntu – Sharing the home folders with other users on the same PC

11.1012.04encryptionhome-directoryshared-folders

After reviewing similar questions on the same subject Im still none the wiser. I want to share my music, pictures and video folders with other users on my pc. I am using 11.10 and will be upgrading to 12.04. The method I have tried is to right click on the folder (as Administrator), select "Sharing Options" check all the necessary fields and give the share a name like "music-shared". Another dialog pops up then and I select "Set nautilus Permissions".
When the other user logs on they go to their Home folder click on the network and can see the "music-shared" folder, but they get a message that the do not have the necessary permissions to view the content. Im sure I'm missing something simple. My Home folder is encrypted and i am willing to unencrypt to make this work Unlike other questions on this site, I dont have a partition etc. i would be grateful for any help.

Best Answer

One way to do this would be to

  1. Create a folder called /shared;
  2. Create a group with any name, such as mediamembers, and add all the users to it. Alternatively, you can allow everyone access);
  3. Set yourself as owner, and group as mediamembers (sudo chown -R yourname:mediamembers /shared; alternatively, just set the permissions for /shared to whatever you want for group and the rest of the world;
  4. Create subdirectories for video, music, pictures, and move the files there from your home directory;
  5. Create symbolic links to these directories in you home directory's subdirectories;
  6. In the future, follow the symbolic link to the shared directory to save files.

You could even mount the directory, and in the future, if your media collection got too big, you could put it on a separate disk and mount that in the same place with no changes for the users.

I have mine on a separate partition to solve a different problem, which is to easily access these file when I install a new distro for testing, etc. I just mount the shared partition, and have everything there.