Integrate ownCloud in Ubuntu with Symbolic Links
Ever since I switched to ownCloud last year I have pretty much stopped using my local file system for any personal documents or media. This is especially handy since I typically used several different computers in a given day. The only thing that is a bit frustrating with this setup is all the wasted links that exist in Nautilus by default. This includes “Documents, Music, Downloads, Videos, etc..”. Although you can simply remove these and use the bookmarks feature of Nautilus to make new folders, there is a better way! Enter symbolic links. Symbolic links are one of the most useful and powerful parts of UNIX based systems. Using symbolic links we can simply redirect the Documents, Music, Pictures, etc folders to our ownCloud folder. This way Nautilus will show you your ownCloud files when you click on these existing links. This essentially integrates ownCloud with your native file system making it pretty transparent and seamless. This can easily be accomplished in two steps.
- Remove the existing folder (this is required to get the symbolic link working.) If you have any data in the existing folders currently be sure to back it up and/or move it because the next step ** will delete these files! **. For example, to reroute our Music folder:
rm -rf /home/$USER/Music
- Create the Symbolic Link
ln -s /home/$USER/ownCloud/Music /home/$USER/Music
ls ~/
you will see that the Music folder is now a lighter shade of blue. You can repeat this step for any additional folders. This will make your life easier and keep Nautilus nice and clean.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Underused Techniques for Effective Emails from Refactoring English
- Death by a thousand slops from daniel.haxx.se
- The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
- Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
- In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
- Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
- What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
- We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Occupation and Preoccupation
Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview: What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation. I’d never really noticed the connection between th…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 17, 2025What do we do when the facts don't matter?
As a journalist by training, I have what you might call an addiction to facts. I believe that there are things that are true and things that are not, and that we can determine one from the other through observation, rational thought, and meticulous resear…
via The Torment Nexus July 17, 2025Back to the Future
This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…
via flower.codes July 17, 2025Generated by openring