Dropbox without Gnome/Nautilus or behind a proxy server

Dropbox is a web-based file syncing service. The nice thing is, it works natively with Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux…and it just works fine. Unfortunately, it has a heavy Gnome/Nautilus dependency. Luckily, it is not that hard to let Dropbox work without the load of dependencies. You find plenty of manuals in the Internet. I will just outline how you do it in three simple steps:

First, you download the Dropbox daemon you need, either 32- or 64-bit Linux:

32bit: http://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86
64bit: http://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64

Secondly, extract the file into your home directory. The extracted folder will be hidden.

Thirdly, use your shell to call the Dropbox daemon:
/home/user/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

After you created your account, and linked your computer to the Dropbox account, you find a ne folder in your home directory named Dropbox. This is your sync folder.

Now you can create a system link to your autostart folder for starting Dropbox at startup.
For KDE it looks like that:
ln -s ~/.dropbox/dropboxd ~/.kde/Autostart/dropboxd

In KDE 4.3 the autostart folder has moved. You can either link it system-wide (not recommended):

ln -s ~/.dropbox/dropboxd  /usr/share/autostart/dropboxd

or user-specific:

ln -s ~/.dropbox/dropboxd  ~/.kde4/share/autostart/dropboxd

Both works fine.

Now Dropbox works fine with any Linux you like (and use).

If you want to install Dropbox behind a proxy server and you are using GNOME, use the same manual. The graphical installer for the package nautilus-dropbox doesn’t work behind a proxy server. It requires the proxy environmental variables, but somehow the script doesn’t get them. However, if you install the Dropbox daemon as in this manual you can manually specify the proxy server settings and it just works fine…as it should.

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