Posts Tagged ‘dropbox’

In the past I have described how to make Dropbox work with Thunar for XFCE users, now I am going to see If I can achieve the same goal for KDE. Dropbox is a great utility which remotely stores documents and other files, and can sync them across multiple computers over the Internet. what I did was to follow the instructions provided by Dread Knight. Afterwards, I figured out that this method could be used for any Linux desktop environment or windows manager and is preferable to the Thunar method mentioned above. If you need, create a Dropbox account here

NOTE: this method is deprecated; try this instead.

Dropbox is a nice file storage devise which can sync a folder over the internet. For the free account, Dropbox provices you with 2gb of data storage. Where, my motivation to use there service is for my documents, this is more then enough space. However, Dropbox develops for KDE and Gnome and leaves out the Thunar file manager. The good news is I found this tutorial for CrunchBang linux. With a few modifications I got it to work with XFCE on Debian.

First, I created an account. After downloading their file, I extracted and renamed the .dropbox-dist folder to dropbox and moved it to the /opt/ directory. I added /opt/openbox/openboxd to the start up applications of XFCE. Next I created the file /bin/nautilus and made it executable

sudo touch /bin/nautilus
sudo chmod +x /bin/nautilus

inside i added the following text:

#!/bin/bash
exec thunar $@
exit 0

I tricked Dropbox in thinking I had Nautilus. It is a relatively simple workaround, making me wonder why the do not allow the user an option to choose their file manager. In addition I created symlinks to my documents, financial files, and task manager files, in the Dropbox folder and it worked beautifully in synchronizing my documents on Dropbox’s server. The downside to the Thunar workaround is that you do not have the animated Icons such as with the KDE, Gnome, and Windows file managers.