GNOME User Share (gnome-user-share) is an open source and tiny package distributed along with the GNOME Project and designed from the ground up to help users easily and effortlessly share files to the masses when using the GNOME desktop environment.

The gnome-user-share program comprises of various free file-sharing technologies, which will provide GNOME users with user-level file sharing functionality that works. It is automatically distributed with each new installation of the GNOME desktop environment.

GNOME User Share is a non-interactive daemon, which runs in the background and starts automatically when the user logs into the GNOME desktop environment. However, it won’t work out of the box, as the file sharing functionality is not enabled by default in GNOME.

The user must enable file sharing from the GNOME Control Center application. Immediately after file sharing is enabled, a WebDav server is started in the background, sharing the generic Public folder from the user’s Home directory to all the computers on the LAN (Local Network Area) using mDNS/rendezvous.

The WebDav server used by the GNOME User Share program is powered by the world’s most powerful free web server, Apache, which must be installed on your GNU/Linux distribution before trying to install this package. In order for the mDNS/rendezvous functionality to work properly, you will have to install Avahi or Howl, and then run mDNSResolver.

While the package is automatically distributed to GNOME users along with each fresh installation of the GNOME desktop environment, it can also be installed manually using the universal source package. By executing the “./configure && make && make install” command (without quotes) in a terminal window, you will configure, compile and install the gnome-user-share package system wide on your GNU/Linux computer.