Using DropBox in Eee PC with Xandros and KDE
DropBox is very convenient online back-up and synchronization service. It has a free version with storage capacity of 2GB.I started using it recently and liked it pretty much. I have the client application installed in one Windows, one Ubuntu and now Eee PC Xandros machines. Using it on Eee PC Xandros was a little bit tricky. DropBox consists of two components daemon and Nautilus plugin. The functionality of the serivce is in the daemon that runs at the background and monitors for changes in the Dropbox directory. The Nautilus plugin is a convenient front-end to the DropBox daemon that provides interactive GUI. The problem of using DropBox in Eee PC Xandros and in general KDE is that Nautilus which is a Genome application. And to install the available binary packages you need to install all the required Nautilus/Genome dependencies (packages). I don’t recommend trying to install these dependent packages because this may lead to uninstalling existing packages thus creating critical dependencies that may cause your system to not run at all.
So how I use DropBox in Eee PC with Xandros. I install only the daemon and don’t have the fancy file annotations and other features that comes with the Nautilus file manager:
- Download the binary of the DropBox daemon from http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86 (this is 32bit version of the binary but should work also on 64bit architectures)
- Then unpack the tar file ($tar -xzvf <file name>) a hidden directory with name .dropbox-dist will be created
- move this directory to your home directory ($mv .dropbox-dist $HOME)
- now you have to run the DropBox daemon – this is the executable named dropboxd inside .dropbox-dist ($
~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd). A login dialog box will appear. Type in your credentials. The default DropBox directory is /home/user/Dropbox. If you get errors you have to upgrade some packages. Better apply all possible upgrades otherwise you can get broken packages (from CTRL+ALT+T, sudo synaptic, choolse "Mark all upgrades", Apply) - DropBox daemon will start synchronizing your files (downloading your files from the web storage)
- The DropBox daemon will run in background and take care of keeping your directory in sync.
However these steps are not sufficient to make DropBox run automatically every time when you boot your computer. To make DropBox daemon run at startup you have to add the following line
/home/user/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd &
- Easy mode: in file $HOME/.icewm/startup (if you don’t have this file refer to the more verbose explanation at Running a script at startup how to do it)
- Advanced mode and KDE: in file $HOME/.kde/AutoStart (if you don’t have this file refer to http://wiki.eeeuser.com/starting_programs_at_bootup?s=autostart)
Any comments on improving this post are welcome.