All entries for Monday 05 July 2010

Dropbox on the CSC linux machines

Follow-up to iPad week3 from Rudo's blog

Dropbox, the 'it just works' file syncing service, released their Linux client recently. Unfortunately, it has a heavy Gnome/Nautilus dependency. If you don't use Gnome, you can get Dropbox to work without that baggage with these steps:

1. Download the closed source Dropbox Linux client from http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86 (x86_64 for 64 bit)
2. Extract the contents and you should get a .dropbox-dist folder out of the archive. Move the folder to $HOME
3. Run ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd.

The first time you run the dropboxd daemon, a wizard will prompt you to configure the client for your machine. By default, Dropbox syncs the contents of the ~/Dropbox folder and as long as the dropboxd daemon is running, it will transparently sync that folder with your Dropbox account. To ensure that the daemon runs whenever you use your computer, just add a symlink to it in your ~/.kde/Autostart/ folder or equivalent location.

You don't actually need to do anything beyond that since it 'just works'. But if you feel like getting hold of some of the info that the Nautilus client provides, you can download this command line utility that some kind soul has written. Hopefully, someone out there is working on KDE integration even as I write this!

(comment taken from http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/dropbox_kde.comments and reproduced for all our benefit here. I tested and yes, got it to work just now.)

Rudo Roemer : 05 Jul 2010 13:00 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem