Dropbox on Debian

Sep 13, 2008

Warning: This post was written 5913 days ago, and may contain incorrect information, outdated opinions, and incorrect language due to my age at the time. Opinions in this post are not representative of who I am as a person today.

Dropbox (archive.org) is out of closed beta and is open for the public, but what is more interesting is that they now have a client for Linux (archive.org). I’ve had a beta email sat in my inbox for about 3-4 months, but I’ve never got round to signing up as I couldn’t get a client for Linux.

Dropbox is one of the new wave of online storage, sort of a cross between WebDAV (archive.org) and SVN (archive.org), in fact, I’d say its almost exactly like SVN, just with a nice GUI. I guess all it would need to take the “value-added” part of this product is for someone to develop a nice front end for Amazon S3 (archive.org), and by looking at their future prices it could be cheaper.

Anyway, picking out the bits of the service is not what I’m here to do. At the moment I run a Debian (archive.org) Testing/Unstable desktop machine, I was quite disappointed to not see a specific Debian package for their software on the website. I realised after a few dumb minutes that I could use the Ubuntu packages.

In sources.list, I referenced their Gusty archive:

deb http://www.getdropbox.com/static/ubuntu gutsy main

Then in /etc/apt/preferences I set some basic package pinning to make sure that any packages didn’t collide with the existing Debian repository, not likely but you never know.

Package: *
Pin: release a=gutsy
Pin-Priority: 400

Do a “apt-get update” and you should have the “nautilus-dropbox” package available to install. Simple! Remember, you’ll need to restart nautilus by either killing it (killall -9 nautilus) or restarting your Gnome session. [edit: Fixed the first URL]