Installing the Dropbox Linux Client under KDE

Dropbox is a file hosting service which enables you to store and share files across the Internet. Dropbox offers clients for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux which is great except that the linux version depends on Gnome/Nautilus and if you use the rpm to install the Dropbox client on a system with only KDE you will end up with most of Gnome installed on your system.

Here is a brief walkthrough on getting Dropbox installed without bringing most of Gnome into your system.

As for dependencies you will need wget (or whichever http downloader you prefer), at least version 2.4 of glibc and python 2.5. You should be able to get these using the package manager included with your distribution.




First we need to change the current directory to our home directory (you can download the file anywhere just make sure to move it to your home directory after you extract the .dropbox-dist folder).

$ cd

Download the 32-bit client

$ wget -O dropbox.tar.gz http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86

or the 64-bit client

$ wget -O dropbox.tar.gz http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86_64

Extract dropbox.tar.gz (the extracted folder will be called .dropbox_dist, you'll need to move it to your home folder if you decided to download it somewhere else)

$ tar -zxof dropbox.tar.gz

Run the dropboxd daemon. This will start the configuration wizard.

$ ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd &

To have the daemon run whenever you log in, add a symlink to ~/.kde/Autostart/ in my case the path is ~/.kde4/Autostart/

$ ln -s ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd ~/.kde4/Autostart/dropboxd

That is all there is to it, you should now have a working instance of Dropbox. The only drawback of not using Gnome/Nautilus is that you don't get the status feedback on the icons within the file manager. You can still check on the status of Dropbox by right-clicking on the Dropbox icon in the system tray.

I'm looking into the documentation for Dropbox as well as Dolphin to see if I can come up with something similar to what Nautilus has. At least I'll try and come up with an ls or something silimilar for getting the Dropbox status.