DropBox on KDE

Dropbox is an awesome utility, but unfortunately they only wrote integration with GNOME. Running KDE on Linux really puts you in the minority of a minority. However, it does run just fine from a KDE desktop and gives you an experience not unlike Dropbox on Windows.

UPDATE:
The following steps are outdated. Back when I wrote this, there were no generic Linux downloads. You could only download for Windows, or get the Nautilus integration. Just finding the Linux tar.gz was hard.

To install Dropbox today, go to https://www.dropbox.com/install?os=lnx and select the package for your distribution.

Once the file is downloaded, double-click it from dolphin and install it, or run (assuming you are running Kubuntu):

sudo dpkg -i dropbox_*_amd64.deb

Download

Since I am running 64-bit Linux, I grabbed the DropBox install from here:

http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64

Install

Once it’s downloaded, move it to your home directory and extract it. On the command line it looks like:

mv dropbox-lnx.x86_64-[VERSION].tar.gz ~/
ch ~/
tar -zxpvf dropbox-lnx.x86_64-[VERSION].tar.gz

This will create a hidden folder called .dropbox-dist. Alternatively you can extract it from where you downloaded it and move the hidden folder afterwards.

You can also do it from Dolphin. Right-click the tar.gz and select Extract->Extract Archive Here, Autodetect Subfolder. Then move the hidden folder to your home directory (you will have to have “Show Hidden Files” turned on in Dolphin, Alt+.).

Run at Startup

Now just a few final steps to get Dropbox to start when you login. Open System Settings and select Startup and Shutdown, then click Add Script. Enter ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd and click Add.

Special thanks to Richard Johnson with his article: http://www.nixternal.com/kde-and-dropbox/