I’ve seen many “recipes” for doing this, including installing the nautilus-dropbox, which drags with it many unnecessary dependencies when using a Package Manager.
I use XFCE on Linux, because it is fast, stable and easy to use and expand with plugins. You can get some serious performance gains if your PC is sluggish by switching to XFCE instead of Gnome, KDE or god forbid, Windows!
I also depend upon Dropbox for my “cloud” service, because I need to be able to access and change my files from many different locations.
But by default Dropbox don’t come with a plugin for getting full support on XFCE’s default file manager “Thunar”.
You can install Dropbox “manually” on any Linux distribution, using a precompiled binary. To get and install the correct distribution for your platform you must make sure you have Wget installed, then you can execute these commands in a Terminal shell (or xterm):
32-bit:
cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86" | tar xzf -
cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64" | tar xzf -
This will change into your default $home directory and unarchive the needed files there.
BEWARE! The folder is hidden, so you won’t see anything in it called dropbox-dist if you don’t have “show hidden files” enabled, or apply the -a parameter to a ls command.
./.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
This wil bring up a window, telling you to enter your credentials or create a new account.
Just follow the prompts to get it going.
Now you need to make sure XFCE starts the deamon each time you log into your account. You can do this in a number of ways, but the graphical way is easy enough for those not too comfortable with Linux. If you know any of the other ways, feel free to use them instead!
./waf configure --prefix=/usr
Checking for program gcc or cc : /usr/bin/gcc
Checking for program cpp : /usr/bin/cpp
Checking for program ar : /usr/bin/ar
Checking for program ranlib : /usr/bin/ranlib
Checking for gcc : ok
Checking for thunarx-2 : yes
Checking for gio-2.0 : yes
‘configure’ finished successfully (0.019s)
Now do:
./waf build
sudo ./waf install
Now, log out and in again or restart your computer, and you should be good to go!
Have Fun!
Thunar Dropbox doesn’t work for me. After installing Dropbox client and Maato’s plugin still no bloody context menu entries in Thunar. Driving me nuts at the moment…
What distro were you using at the time of writing? I’m using Lubuntu 12.10 with Thunar as my file manager and have been having trouble with this. The thunarx-2 and thunarx-2-dev tip was helpful, other sites didn’t include this. Problem is, those packages aren’t in the repository. That’s a bit of a bummer, but I think I can handle going to website just to get a public link to a file. Anyway, good post.
Oh, that’s a tough one to answer man… I’ve been using Ubuntu (Amongst others) since version 1.
But my guess would be somewhere around 9.04 or something like that.
The procedure should still be valid though…
Haha, a distro-hopper are we? Thanks.
I’ve “hopped” from using Debian Testing before that though… And developed a bit on the Fedora Project. Cheers! Merry Christmas!
I’m not a “distro hopper” I just like experimenting… 🙂
These days I’m into the Mate Desktop environment.
I’m a registered Fedora contributor,so mychoice fell on the Fedora Mate Spin…
I read this post completely concerning the comparison of most recent and earlier technologies,
it’s awesome article.