Please note: I am writing this post basically for my own reference, i,e,:If I ever have to reinstall this crappy client in the future, so that I remember the do’s and don’t’s of this adventurous process.
I meanwhile got used to the fact that most of the Linux end user world is heading either towards SUSE or Ubuntu. But I prefer RPM based distributions over .DEB and I was always annoyed that SUSE did things so much different than other distros, but I found my fave in Mandriva. Easy to use, superior hardware support and absolutely fun to work with.
Since the wacky situation of the distro it’s even worse with RPM packages just for Mandriva.
When searching for an easy way to exchange files with my friends for working on the Scene World project I wanted to use a service that can be accessed from everywhere: Windows, Mac, iOS (iPhone/iPod touch/iPad), the web and I thought “Ah, there is surely simply a client to install in the package manager of Mandriva just like there was for Flickr.”).
So, yesterday night I got the brilliant idea to watch out for installing dropbox.
Ah, I was so happy! 🙂
I entered “dropbox” and found “dropbox-nautrius” . Okay, that’s for GNOME – I prefer KDE – but at least it’s something…. So I installed and started it. Then it would tell me that it requires to download and install the dropbox deamon.
From what I read, there should be appearing a GUI installer now asking you for your user name and password, but nothing.
So I had a look at what is actually happening. The dropbox application tries to run with the parameters “start -i”. Makes sense, probably trying to start the initialization.
Rebooting the machine, rebooting into GNOME and trying to start the application resulted into error messages of missing permissions to write to certain dropbox folders and files.
KFilebox (yeah the URL and some places still says “KDroobox” but who cares). The how to install page …..ah dejavu… the Dropbox daemon again with its nice setup GUI that never works on me.
Googling for other options only resulted in helpful German manuals which I will refer to here, the solution is from them 🙂
Funrecycler’s Run Dropbox without a GUI blog post mentions the command-line utility. So I installed that one, when trying to run it it said “dropbox deamon not found, run “dropbox -i” to install it.”…….
….So I just did that which would result in a message that the paremeter “-i” is unknown and a list of known commands……NOOOOOOOOOOO
So what I did then is reinstalling all dropbox related RPMs in the Mandriva RPM packet manager and shutting down to go to sleep.
Next morning I ran the dropbox command line client again and it worked right away!
Qouoting the manual:
“If you’re running Dropbox on your server for the first time, you’ll be asked to copy and paste a link in a working browser to create a new account or add your server to an existing account”
(reminder to myself: Don’t start as root user…)
Once done that, the files should be synced to /home/user/Dropbox
Now I set symbolic links to sync the folders wished or to enable other users access to the dropbox shared folder. (hint found on Fene’s blog post Setup Dropbox under Linux (Debian) without GUI.
Interestingly, in contrast to this manual, the service deamon is already starting automatically during startup of Linux. Last but not least I will download and put the CLI script to be able to control it.
Reminder to myself: There are no RPM packages (despite mentioned in the installation instructions) of KFilebox on its homepage. Probably because he gave up on it.
So use RPM Search and download latest version for Mandriva.Thanks to funrecycler for his speedy replies to my emails and helping me to get this thing working! Thanks a lot!
Technorati Tags: Dropbox, Mandriva
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