Question

Hi.

Does anyone know if it's possible to install Dropbox without root priviledges in Linux? I've tried to install it at my university, using the sources found here, but I seem to need to enter the root password (which of course, I don't know).

Thanks in advance!
Manuel

Answer 1

You don't give your distribution, but since you aren't installing as root it's probably not important. (The binaries are meant to be installed system-wide, so unless you can convince your system administrator to install the package, you'll need to compile and install to your home directory.)

Essentially, Dropbox's Linux client is two parts: a daemon, dropboxd, that provides a "per-user closed-source daemon process that makes sure your $HOME/Dropbox directory is properly synchronized", and a client that connects to the daemon and provides information. The binaries provided supply a Nautilus plugin for Gnome, although there are also CLI clients available.

You'll want to refer to Installing to a Text-Based Linux Environment, which includes links to the daemon binaries for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. If you don't need the Nautilus plugin, make use of the official Dropbox CLI script or a user-created alternative CLI script.

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If you really want the Nautilus plugin, you'll need to build it from the source package, and install it to your home directory.

Untar the source package:

tar xjf nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1.tar.bz2 
cd nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1

Run the configure script; add the options you wnat, but you'll need the --prefix= option:

./configure --prefix=/home/<username>

If this fails, you'll probably need to grab headers for the libraries needed to compile the program: GTK 2.12, GLib 2.13, Nautilus 2.16, and Libnotify 0.4.4 (minimum versions; if you can match up the version provided by your system, you can avoid the actual compilation and just grab header files to install to your own ~/include directory).

Build and install the binaries; they should be installed to your home directory (eg ~/bin, ~/share, ~/lib, ~/man, etc).

make
make install

Note this is the basic process, and you may need to work through them a few times depending on what libraries and headers are available on your system. All of these steps are possible without root access, but you will have to modify any installations to install them to your home directory instead of system locations like /lib or /usr.

If you run into trouble, your best bet for finding help is the Dropbox forums.