Mine the Harvest

Dropbox is a service which allows you to easily share and synchronize files across several computers and mixed platforms. The client is available for Linux, OS X and Windows. Once installed, anything placed in your Dropbox folder on one machine is synchronized with the other – your most recent version is thus always on all systems using Dropbox and also via your web accessible storage account.

If you like, download it from here as doing so will give you (and me) and additional 250MB of space in addition to the 2GB you already get.

For me, this is a wonderful tool. I can place all my papers for school, research notes from work, to do lists, etc. in one location and have them always available no matter if I am at work, home or out and about on my UMPC. Additionally, if you sign up for the beta you get 2 Gigs of space on your web account for free, should you need more you can buy additional space at reasonable prices. Also, you can use it for version control so in addition to simply sharing files you can revert to previous versions. Definitely a great tool.

What about using it with KDE?

As it is still in development there is not a native KDE client. The existing tools are centered around Gnome. My solution was to install the dropbox tool using the generic Linux binary package and manually copy some files around.

Ordinarily you would then start dropbox from Gnome and create your account, etc. As I was not running Gnome I discovered this post which provides a simple means of launching the account creation dialog. Just download the client tarball (change to x86_64 for 64 bit) , extract it and move the .dropbox-dist to your home directory and then execute ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd & to start the daemon which will launch the account creation wizard too. (Don’t download the source code from the site, download the binary using the above link.)

To automatically start the syncronization daemon at login, just symlink it as:

paracelsus@Callandor:~> ln -s ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd ~/.kde/Autostart/

Now, anything placed in your /home/Dropbox folder will be synced!

Should you wish, you can also install nautilis and its dependencies and use it that way – but there is really no point. Just put things in your drop box folder and if the daemon is running it will be synced with your web account and other systems. Done. You can check how much space you have left by logging into your web account.

There is a project working on a KDE client so you will get fancy desktop notifications, implement the version control, etc.  – but you certainly don’t need to wait for it to take advantage of this now under KDE.

Cheers,

Pete