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Our Blogs Apexing the Linux learning curve Dropbox on Ubuntu 8.10
Our Blogs Apexing the Linux learning curve Dropbox on Ubuntu 8.10 | Dropbox on Ubuntu 8.10 |
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| by Hamish Taylor | |
| Friday, 02 January 2009 | |
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Page 2 of 3 As stated before, Dropbox takes advantage of the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for the provision of the storage itself. This makes it available from anywhere and you can be reasonably confident of your data being available all the time.Featured Whitepaper
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When using applications in the "cloud" such as S3, security is a big concern (as it should be). Dropbox state on their website that all transfers use SSL and that files are encrypted with AES-256 bit encryption before being uploaded. For added protection, you can optionally encrypt files yourself before you upload them. OK, so how do you install it? Once you have signed up for an account, you can download and install the client for your distribution. I use Ubuntu 8.10 so will talk about that. I downloaded the .deb file and installed it. If you are unfamiliar with how to do this, have a look at this article that I wrote earlier this year. The installer gives you the option of signing up for an account or using an existing account (which is how I added my second computer to my account). As the installer integrates with the file manager, Nautilus, once the installation has completed you'll need to restart Nautilus. This can be done any one of four ways: restart the computer; log out and then back in again; press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to restart the graphical user interface (requires you to log back in); or using the Command Line Interface type in "killall nautilus", which restarts Nautilus. I haven't installed it on Windows, but I assume that because of the integration with Windows Explorer that you'd need to do a complete restart of the computer. Once that's done, then you should have a small blue icon in the top right of your screen. If you left-click, it opens up the folder with the sub-folders visible. If you right-click the icon, you get the context menu with some interesting options. "Open My Dropbox" simply opens the folder with the sub-folders visible. "Web Interface" opens up the web page where you can do all sorts of things, inluding managing your account, share folders and get the public URLs for photo galleries. You can also see the status of your Dropbox, with it usually stating that it is "Up to date", but when you are transferring files, this is where you can see how it's going. "Preferences" allows you to change the upload, download speeds and a few other options. So what can I actually do with it? Please read onto page 3... |
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