Dropbox without Gnome / Nautilus

At some point you may switch to a different OS and that OS might not include Gnome. If that is the case, then Nautilus is probably not the file manager either. I ran into this recently while running Xubuntu on one of my systems.

After googling around for a few, I came across another great blog that already had the answer. http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/dropbox_kde.html

I simply added /home/himuraken/.dropbox/dropboxd to my startup and it is working great.

–Himuraken

Ubuntu upgrade kills Dropbox

I have been a user of Dropbox for about six months now and think that it is a great service. I have it installed and running on five systems, all of which run Ubuntu.

When Jaunty Jackelope was released a week ago, I decided to upgrade all of my Ubuntu boxes. While the upgrade went flawlessly on all five systems, Dropbox died. I went out and downloaded the latest version of Dropbox which has Ubuntu 9.04 listed. Reinstalling the package did not resolve the issue. So I started playing at the command line and realized that this is really easy to fix. Here is the fixed that I came up with:

Open up a terminal and type in dropbox status and you should see a message like Dropbox isn’t running!. If you try and run dropbox start you will get another error indicating that The Dropbox daemon is not installed! and the resolution which is to start with the -i option.

So the actual command to install the daemon is dropbox start -i. Once I ran that, the daemon and Nautilus extension launched and updated immediately.

Few people are aware of the command line use of dropbox. Play around with the utility and see what I mean. The dropbox filestatus command is pretty neat. Just run it from within your Dropbox folder.

–Himuraken