Hi all,

I have  one computer in my living room with four users on it, my self, my wife and my two kids (5 and 8 years old). I am "super user" (That is, I am an computer amateur, but I administer the computer). Its running Ubuntu 8.10, and we use Amarok to play all our music.

No, I'd like to just "mirror" (or link) the Amarok collection, with all the covers and the rest, from the super user to the other three accounts, so that the three other users would automatically get the same collection as the super user. I'd really prefer something like treating the super user-collection as a "server" for the three others, and the three others just being "clients".

Just to illustrate what I want, I tried to make this link:

kid1_account@living_room: /home/kid1_account/.kde/share/apps$ ls

....
..... amarok -> /home/SUPER_USER/.kde/share/apps/amarok

Now that failed. Amarok just replaced the link with a directory once I started it. Do you see what I try to do, and can anyone help me to a solution?

thanks!

-lars

There is probably a way to do that but Im not sure how.  One thing you could do is put all of the music on an external drive(this is how me and my roommate have it set up) and let everyone have access to that

Depending on what versions of things you're running, you could look into Kiosk Mode for KDE, but that's probably overkill for what you want.
If every user has their own account, then they will have their own Amarok preferences directory, as you already know. Instead of trying to have one *collection*, allowing each user to have their own collection means they can keep their own music stats and the like. Then you can simply create a symlink to your ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/albumcovers . If this gives you permission problems, the other way is to create a new directory, call it albumcovers, then symlink EVERYONE'S albumcovers directory to that one.

I did this for a while when I was playing with shared collections across a number of computers. The collection sharing didn't work out for us here, but sharing the album covers was a huge time-saver. I spent a number of weeks working through all my music, allocating covers, scanning them where they couldn't be found online... to then be able to share that cover between machines was very convenient. Made it easier to backup the directory, too.

Hope that all made sense!