Friendly Tech Ninja Linux how-to's for beginners

Howto: Compile Dropbox from Source on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

It's very straight forward to do and doesn't really take much time at all. If you're on another Debian based distro it should work fine.

Step 1

Download the source files from here www.getdropbox.com/downloading and unzip it (right click and "Extract Here").

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Step 2

We now need to install the dependencies in order to build our install files from source.
Open up your Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install libnautilus-extension-dev libnotify-dev python-docutils

Follow the prompts and it should a a few minutes to download and install everything.

Step 3

Navigate to where you created your /nautilus-dropbox folder (it'll probably have a version number after it) in the Terminal, in my case:

cd /Downloads/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1/

Step 4

Once inside type the following commands into your Terminal:

./configure
make
sudo make install


Run each command one after another, they'll run for just a couple of seconds each.

Step 5

After installing it simply log out and log back into your system, navigate to Applications → Internet → Dropbox, click “OK” and it'll download and install the daemon and then prompt you for your Dropbox details.

As you can see it's a pretty easy install and it's been working great for me!

If you have any questions, comments or tips, please leave a comment below.

Note: I originally posted this guide for the Karmic beta, but seeing as it's release and dropbox have a .deb installer it'll have more use under this post.

Related posts:

1. Howto: Install Dropbox on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Beta
2. Howto: Install Dropbox on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
3. Howto: Compile Chromium Browser on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
4. Howto: Fix Alert/System Beep in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
5. Howto: Fix Gnome Do Home Folder Bug on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala