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:
- Download the closed source Dropbox Linux client from http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86 (x86_64 for 64 bit)
- Extract the contents and you should get a
.dropbox-distfolder out of the archive. Move the folder to$HOME - 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
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Tags: Ipad
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Comments (3)
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Michael Allen
For me it would be a minor drawback that dropbox seems to consume 60-70% of a cpu on your linux box all the time .
20 Aug 2010, 11:22
Rudo Roemer
The issue which Mike correctly identifies seems a bug in dropbox which seems to happen after long periods without restarts (and thanks to CSC, the uptime of our machines are long). I have not seen a “60-70%” load, but the occasional constant background 10% use.
I handle this as follows: simply “stop” the dropbox daemon interactively, then restart it from your .kde/Autostart folder. On my desktop, the dropbox daemon then works for 1 minute checking that everything is synchronized. Then it stops and does not consume CPU time anymore until you change the content of the dropbox folder. If you do, it works and then stops again.
20 Aug 2010, 11:37
Jaroslaw Zachwieja
Be advised, dropbox binary installation and use on CSC systems in in contravention of CSC AUP.
Users are kindly asked not to follow this advice.
Thanks,
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CSC admin
27 Apr 2015, 11:41
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