Dropbox - The must-have online filesharing utility - Making it work on Fedora 12

Dropbox is a free online file transfer and storage synchronizing utility, which also optionally allows you to publicly share files and photos. It works on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

To get started with Dropbox, you first need a free account. You can sign-up for Dropbox free here. You can obtain a 2gb account for free, or pay for larger account sizes. You can also obtain referral links once you have an account and send that to friends and increase you account size by 256mb (1/4th a gb) for each friend that signs up. I'm up to 2.5gb of free storage at this point.

The Photo sharing part is really nice. You can drag a folder into the Dropbox/Photos directory, and then right-click on the folder that is now copied, and select Dropbox - Copy Public Gallery Link, and you'll get a URL that you can share with everyone to see your photos in that folder. The only downside at all that I can see is that you don't get permanent URLs for individual photos (you can get temporary ones that are gone moments later), but it's a nice way to get a quick photo album up and online for everyone to see.

Because this is online, I wouldn't dream of putting any files on here that, should Dropbox have a glitch, I wouldn't mind if the whole world had access to. You have to realize this is the security dilemma that you always have with any sort of "cloud computing." If you must put a file online that you don't want the contents shared, use GPG to first encrypt it before moving it to your Dropbox folder. (As an aside, never, ever, consider putting your GPG private keys online. Sneakernet it via USB thumbdrive or some other method!)

I also wouldn't use this as my end-all be-all method to backup files. I'd still use some sort of long-term backup solution. You never know if Dropbox might go belly-up, or have a glitch and lose all those files.

To install on Fedora 12, there is not a pre-built RPM (update, see below, there is now). The Fedora 10 RPM will not give you all the options and will not work properly, so don't even try (I did, just to test). So instead install some development tools on F12, and compile Dropbox from source:

su -c 'yum groupinstall Development Tools'
su -c 'yum install nautilus-devel libnotify-devel python-docutils'

mkdir /opt/download/dropbox
cd /opt/download/dropbox

#Check that this is the latest link to the source from Dropbox:
# https://www.dropbox.com/downloading
wget https://www.dropbox.com/download?dl=packages/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1.tar.bz2

tar -xjpvf nautilus-dropbox-*.tar.bz2

cd nautilus-dropbox-*

./configure
make
su -c 'make install'

dropbox stop
dropbox start
dropbox status

# clean-up unnecessaries -devel RPMs

# undo yum install python-docutils
su -c 'rpm --erase python-docutils'
# undo yum install libnotify-devel
su -c 'rpm --erase libnotify-devel dbus-devel dbus-glib-devel'
# undo yum install nautilus-devel
su -c 'rpm --erase nautilus-devel atk-devel cairo-devel gtk2-devel libXcomposite-devel pango-devel pixman-devel'

Now logout of Gnome via System - Logout and sign back in. You should see a blue dropbox icon in your upper tray.

Can you put things in your ~/Dropbox folders and they'll sync online. Now you can sign in and access these files from any computer, anywhere. Plus, you can install Dropbox on other PCs and synchronize files back and forth, say between a laptop and a desktop, etc. Open the RTF files in those directories with OpenOffice.org for more information on how those folders work. You can view a tour here.

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Update March 9, 2010:

You can also use the ~/Dropbox/Public/ folder to put things in to share with anyone you like, and they don't need a Dropbox account to view the files.  The downside is that you can only produce one link per file at a time, and you cannot easily share whole folders.  However, there are a number of projects to produce an index of the files in a directory, and then you can just share the link to the index, which in turn shares links to all the files in the directory.  I'm using DropboxIndex and it works good.

Update May 28, 2010:
Dropbox has a Fedora RPM available now on their download page, and even better a repository available to keep you up to date.

cat <<EOF>> /etc/yum.repos.d/dropbox.repo
[Dropbox]
name=Dropbox Repository
baseurl=http://linux.dropbox.com/fedora/\$releasever/
gpgkey=http://linux.dropbox.com/fedora/rpm-public-key.asc
EOF
yum -y install nautilus-dropbox


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Update: July 7, 2010
Dropbox has added LAN Sync, so when your PCs can transfer files locally if they're on the same LAN and not have to go through the Internet. However, by default Fedora is going to have the ports blocked. Open up UDP & TCP port 17500 to allow Dropbox LAN Sync to work. It's amazingly fast (as it should be) once you have it set up.