Dropbox, is for Linux!

Dropbox is a online storage system that also synchronizes a folder in your computer. Thus, it can synchronize files that you have on multiple computers, imagine: your music folder is the same on your laptop and home computer, when you grab some new songs they “virtually fly over from one computer to another” at the speed of an internet connection.

The service is very interesting and actually good, they offer 2Gbytes free of charge, and of course you can be tricky and make multiple accounts and so forth. But actually 50Gbytes are so cheap that I’d strongly advise to thing twice and maybe spend a few dollars from your pocket.

Full Linux Support

Yep, this is how contemporary apps sound like (and should be). Go to their website and download the Linux Dropbox version, install it. It will run a small “tour” installation program that allows you to create or link to an existing account, and customize the place for the Dropbox folder (this is the folder that will be automatically updated and uploaded/downloaded).

(dropbox being used, double click the item and your folder will appear)

Also if you use a Window Manager called Gnome (this is the part of the Operating system that takes care of the visual aspects of your Windows and running programs) you can install an add on. The add-on is called nautilus-dropbox and is very useful, it allows you to right-click on an item in your dropbox and access some neat shortcuts, such as “get public link” which is extremely useful to share things with your friends.

(installing the nautilus-dropbox plugin via synaptic, use whatever installer you like the most!)

Dropbox in Linux, sounds like a sea of possibilities

Of course, like everything in the open-source community there’s a lot of scripts, add-ons and cool things to use along side the standard dropbox. A bit after started using dropbox (more than one year ago) I developed a simple script that allows to: “zip a folder” + “move the zip automatically to the dropbox public folder” + “return the public link” ! Since this is all very basic, I just noticed that it is already available on the add-on section of the dropbox site: shell script that uploads to public folder!
And if your really hardcore Linux (then you’ll probably won’t find anything useful in this blog) you can install dropbox in a entirely text based environment, see this tutorial (no graphics!). This is cool if you manage a server and want to use dropbox, or share folders with your users.