run linux on gmail

posted Apr 14th 2005 8:00am by Vince Veneziani
filed under: Uncategorized

Linux Code

yes you read right. it’s possible to install linux on gmail. richard jones wrote some python that allows you to mount linux within gmail. you can use all kinds of unix commands to communicate with gmail like ls, rm, grep, cp, etc. it’s an ongoing project in development but it’s very cool and allows you basically a 2gb virtual drive of sorts. you’ll need to have libgmail and FUSE at hand to make it work properly. libgmail communicates with gmail while FUSE provides the filesystem. Give it a shot, it looks like it’s progressing very nicely.

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Comments [52]

Reader Comments

now thats just messed up…

but its pretty cool nonetheless…

Posted at 8:17 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by the captain

holy shit.

some people are just plain sadistic.

Posted at 8:19 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by Alex

just another thought…

you could get a floppy bootdisk, and then chroot to /gmailfs with a base fs installed, and then it could get quite interesting.

I wonder how google would feel about that.

Posted at 8:24 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by Alex

Just a thought after some of your comments:

What about Darwin on Gmail? X11? What are the possibilities? Terminal? Telnet? Etc? Could it be possible to even run an FTP? Dig around and let’s find out. I mean we all have like 90 invites anyway.

-Vince V.

Posted at 9:40 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by vince veneziani

I don’t really see the point… are you saying you could “boot” from Linux anywhere if you had those two programs? If that is what your saying, is that possible with windows?

Posted at 9:44 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by Matt

I cant even begin to describe how much this confuses me.

Posted at 10:15 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by max

You can’t actually “mount linux on gmail”, but you can mount gmail accounts as drives in linux. Deceptive headline.

Posted at 11:08 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by zach brock

I think you mean the other way around. You can’t ‘run linux on gmail’, how would you boot it?

What you can do is mount your gmail account under linux, like you mention. This has been possible for some time, under Windows. Good to see it’s working under Linux now.

Posted at 11:22 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by Ben Bleything

I’m sorry, but the wording in this article just bothers me. You can’t actually run linux “on gmail”, but you can mount your gmail account as a filesystem under linux. YOU CAN DO THE SAME THING IN WINDOWS …. http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm …. same basic idea, mount gmail as a virtual drive.

Posted at 11:31 am on Apr 14th, 2005 by POLYMIRA

polymira is right, the article simple describes using your gmail account as a storage system. This entry is worded incorrectly.

Posted at 12:36 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by k0an

yeah, isnt that run gmail on linux?
You would never be able to boot from gmail without some sort of bizare hardware hack that made the pc think gmail was a drive. there would need to be an interpretation of the transfer protocols by the network card. Otherwise youll prolly be booting to linux to boot linux from the gmail

Posted at 12:47 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by Yet another Matt

It’s not running linux off gmail! duh! It’s just mounting a mock filesystem via gmail.

For example, if you were running linux, you could mount your gmail and store files there.

again… IT IS NOT RUNNING LINUX ON GMAIL

Posted at 1:15 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by David

this hack lets you mount a filesystem stored remotely in your gmail account.

Idea: take a small linux distro, floppy or cd or usb based. Now, include these gmailfs libs, mount the drive as /mnt/gmail, then run a ‘chroot /mnt/gmail’. Voila, your / is now running off gmail. Use the documentation from http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ and you’ve got linux, running remotely stored information on gmail. Linux, on gmail.

Posted at 1:33 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by alex

I think this would be useful for placing a WRT54g in the wild. Running openWRT you could plug the router in somewhere with an internet connection or even use it wirelessly and as long as you could reach gmail the router would have 2Gb of file space. This could also be used to remotely update the software.

Posted at 2:26 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by mollyhackit

I don’t folks. I think you could run Linux off of Gmail. Ponder this.

Run Qemu, with a virtual drive that is connected to gmail. Boot from that. The host pc could manage the connection, and it would be transparent to the Guest OS

OMFG Windows XP on Qemu on Gmail!!!!!! AHAHAHAHAHAAHA

Posted at 2:32 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by Bob Stansalot

I heard that gfs was SUPER slow, I talked to a guy who has a small partition on his linux box, he says when he runs ls, it takes about a minute.

Posted at 4:45 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by bob smith

yeah, this has been around on windows for a couple of months

Posted at 5:42 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by gsham

even if it were worth it to mount linux on Gmail, i have a feeling Gmail would turn around and mount it back, just to show who’s boss

Posted at 6:06 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by ryan

I would love for knoppix to mount my home directory on gmail….

Posted at 9:20 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by thorak

I never had thought about that with the WRT54G… have 2 myself, running a 3rd party firmware… and i think that if gmailfs could be running on it, you could do something like run snort on it and have all the logs go to the gmail account…. could be fun.

Posted at 10:09 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by POLYMIRA

It’s been around for Linux for months, too. From the GmailFS site linked to by the article:

“Saturday August 28th 2004
Released version 0.1.”

Posted at 10:58 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by Nyuk

——-
“even if it were worth it to mount linux on Gmail, i have a feeling Gmail would turn around and mount it back, just to show who’s boss”
——-

Well duh…
Gmail’s storage keeps increasing doesn’t it?
Where do you think it’s all coming from? ;)

Posted at 11:39 pm on Apr 14th, 2005 by mike m.

I would love for someone to make a gmail FTP system

Posted at 1:41 am on Apr 15th, 2005 by Miniman

#19, that’s a fabulously good idea. Somebody call the “Knoppix Hacks” people!

Posted at 4:01 am on Apr 15th, 2005 by anonymous

newbie here just wondering if you like several accounts could you boost the amount of this virutal drive?

Posted at 4:07 am on Apr 15th, 2005 by silershovler

#25 – sorta creating a stiped raid system, effectivly allowing 20mb files to be stored, and 4gb of space!

i love the idea of using it for wild routers too

Posted at 7:51 am on Apr 15th, 2005 by Yet another Matt

Guys who have been saying “Windows has had this for aaages”.

Linux had this way WAY before the windows apps were being circulated. As is nearly always the way with cool hacks.

Posted at 10:16 am on Apr 15th, 2005 by Jonty

has anyone here actually gotten this to work? i keep getting errors relating to the parsing of the inode number out of the subjects, which seems to be caused by libgmail no longer parsing correctly, therefore breaking gmailfs. apparently libgmail is putting the date in the subject variable

Posted at 2:44 pm on Apr 15th, 2005 by Kevin

never mind my last message. it took a bit of hacking in gmailfs.py and the cvs version of libgmail to make it work but i got there. still a bit buggy. perhaps there are problems with the version included in the debian package

Posted at 4:34 pm on Apr 15th, 2005 by Kevin

for those talking about gmailfs working under linux, it worked there long ago, then made it to windows, not the other way around. But I don’t think that’s what this article is even talking about

Posted at 9:38 pm on Apr 15th, 2005 by martin bishop

No one said it came to windows first, i just said that (because this is old news… not breaking news) that as of right now, the windows solutiom has been around for a long time … within a 3 month time span of gmailfs .. which has been around for what … 10 months?

Posted at 11:24 pm on Apr 15th, 2005 by POLYMIRA

Won’t Gmail start blocking this like they do RoamDrive, Gmail Drive, and Peer2Mail?

Posted at 12:47 am on Apr 16th, 2005 by suntiger

A really cool trick of combining the space on gmail account and linux to get a mobile operating system which travels with you.
–
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com

Posted at 10:43 pm on Apr 17th, 2005 by Ravi

Axly, the GmailFS for *first* on linux, then on Windows. I heard folks playing with it in august and it was working nicely. The title confused me because a) it was worded wrong b)the fact that you can use mount Gmail as a drive in linux or in Windows is so well known that I wouldnt expect THIS website to only discover it for the 1st time.

Posted at 3:27 am on Apr 18th, 2005 by DmitryK

what about clustering you 50 google accounts?

Posted at 12:57 pm on Apr 18th, 2005 by randomtaper

Do you really think u’ll be able to have those 50 accounts open for a long time without Google closing at least a few of them?

Posted at 9:31 pm on Apr 18th, 2005 by DmitryK

its just as adding another drive to ur machine, but is remotly located and could be accessed thru gmail. Is it anything else ?

Posted at 4:28 am on Apr 21st, 2005 by Rahul

its just as adding another drive to ur machine, but is remotly located and could be accessed thru gmail. Is it anything else ?

Posted at 4:30 am on Apr 21st, 2005 by Rahul

Interesting. But not totally fixed yet.

As Kevin mentioned, its going to take some hacking on the latest libgmail cvs. and its not just the debian package..

Posted at 4:16 am on Apr 22nd, 2005 by viksit

I want to use the gmail account as an FTP server.
What do you think about that?

Posted at 3:32 am on Apr 29th, 2005 by Anyeos

This is old news

Posted at 11:07 am on May 15th, 2005 by ultramancool

Ha ha ha. What we need down is a LUFS module for mounting GMail accounts, along with support for combining multiple accounts with RAID ! Then you can take your 50 invites and have a spare 100GB remote filesystem, w00t.

But in reality I hate GMail and their evil privacy policy, and I wouldn’t touch it with a 10TB pole.

Posted at 2:15 am on May 18th, 2005 by Raven Morris

Sounds pretty neat, but I wish Google (the company) would actually condone this. However, I guess the whole issue with using g-mail as a filesystem of any sort is that it circumvents all of the advertising. Then again, so does using gmail with pop3 and thunderbird, so maybe that’s not why they don’t like it.

Does anyone know the official reason why Google doesn’t like this kind of use?

Posted at 9:24 pm on May 24th, 2005 by Tom

#43 I’m pretty sure they don’t like it because to them it would just be a big waste of space, bandwith, and account names. It would also probably crash the servers if all the linux users just started making raid arrays of all their accounts, and puting alot of files on them.

Posted at 1:17 am on May 31st, 2005 by Michael

hola como estamos

Posted at 6:12 pm on Jun 2nd, 2005 by xmen

esta super la pagina

Posted at 8:20 pm on Jun 3rd, 2005 by fer

More than a year later and I still don’t understand what 45 & 46 said. :(

Posted at 2:25 pm on Jun 6th, 2006 by db

45 & 46 means:
hi… how are you/we all (45)
great page (46)

:) Vou ter k testar isto :) (48)
i’ve to try this (48) :)

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Posted at 11:23 am on Oct 12th, 2007 by Crackmails

I don’t like the Google policies too. But they are a company and want to gain money. For that they must take some control.
Anyway using an gmail account as ftp filesystem is not too fast. That is not good enought. For what you want to do that? I have all my things in my own hard disk.

Bye.

Posted at 9:42 am on Oct 18th, 2008 by Anyeos

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