Installing Dropbox From Source Code

January 2, 2014
linux, dropbox, installation

If you are installing Dropbox from source code, you must have read this help page. It is not a detailed documentation. You might run into few well known issues.

From my experience of installing Dropbox on Arch Linux,

  • Download the source code from official repository
  • Extract the tarball tar xvjf ./nautilus-dropbox-1.4.0.tar.bz2
  • Switch your working directory to the extracted source code directory
    cd ./nautilus-dropbox-1.4.0
  • Make sure that you are using python2(docgen.py uses execfile() function which is deprecated in python3). Dropbox installation is not supported by python3
  • Run ./configure
  • Copy the dropbox.in file to dropbox
    cp dropbox.in dropbox
    We do this because, when you execute make, docgen.py will depend on a file named “dropbox” but it is present as “dropbox.in” in the source code
  • Run make
  • When I ran make I ran into another error from “dropbox” file. Around line 285
    box_logo_pixbuf = @IMAGEDATA64@
    window_icon = @IMAGEDATA16@
    it was not able to resolve @IMAGEDATA64@ and @IMAGEDATA16@ but as these are just icon and logo images I commented out these lines.
  • Run make install

Have fun with Dropbox :)

Comments