Dropbox in Debian Lenny (Gnome)

If you’ve been reading lately, you read where I installed Dropbox in my Slack64-13.0 and Slack64-13.1 on my desktop and laptop machines, respectively.

If you haven’t been reading, poo on you.

I use Debian on my desktop machine as a backup operating system. It’s fully functional and shares some common partitions with Slack; to keep synch’d somewhat. However, installing Dropbox would also be helpful for transferring stuff to and fro between these operating systems, which reminds me… I need to install Dropbox on my Win 7 laptop installation, too.

Anywho, installing in Debian isn’t quite as easy as it was in Slack, but it’s not that bad. Here’s how ya’ do it:

• Download the source tarball from Dropbox’s site.
• Untar it in your download or build directory.
• Install the necessary dependencies using apt:

# apt-get install libnautilus-extension1-dev libnotify python-docutils

• As root from within the recently extracted dropbox folder:

# ./configure -prefix=/usr/local

# make

# make install

# make clean

• Logout
• Login
• Start Dropbox from the newly created menu launcher.
• Follow the setup baloney.

Have FUN!

Later…

~Eric

More Clouds On the Horizon?

We were talking here a little while ago about the Slacker’s cloudy furure.

Well, folks… it has taken a turn for the cloudier. I officially fired up my very own Dropbox this morning. I’ve been running images and Mozilla profiles back and forth between my lappy and my desktop using a thumb drive. Well, that’s just so 2008. Know what I mean? It was time for a newer more efficient method of sharing between my systems.

Dropbox is the slickest damned things since stuffed-crust pizza. I like it! I’m still a bit paranoid about this cloud stuff. I even encrypt my .mozilla profiles before uploading to Dropbox. I don’t want Yuri and his friends to hack into my saved passwords and form data, you know. 😉

This was a breeze to install in Slackware. There was a SlackBuild already available on the SlackBuilds.org servers. Also, Alien Bob has an older version on his SlackBuilds server. Note: there is only a 13.1 version at SlackBuilds.org, but it compiles and runs fine on 13.0.

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll get a neat little Dropbox folder in your /home directory (or wherever you choose to put it). Here’s a screenie of mine:

Anything you put into your Dropbox folder is then uploaded to the cloud and accessible by you via the website or any of your Dropbox sych’d systems. In other words, I can see what’s in that Dropbox directory from my desktop or my laptop. Furthermore, if I went to my brother’s house and logged into Dropbox’s web page on his computer, I could also access my Dropbox files. It’s COOL!

Drop me an email an I’ll send you a Dropbox invitation. Yeah… you earn stuff (more space) if you get folks to sign up.

Have FUN… and learn something. It won’t hurt you none.

Until next time…

~Eric