Dropbox on Ubuntu 8.10

Hamish Taylor
Friday, 02 January 2009 12:37

Opinion and Analysis

In a continuing series of articles highlighting that GNU/Linux is a viable replacement operating system, today we're exploring how to use Dropbox on the popular Ubuntu distribution.

For those who haven't heard of Dropbox, think of it as online backups made super simple. You can also share files across computers, share files with anyone (publicly) and create photo galleries and share them too.

Dropbox is one of those things that once you start using it, you really wonder why this hasn't been done before. In fact, it is so easy that it just becomes part of your daily life and you stop thinking about it!

Dropbox is a tech startup which has received funding via the TechCrunch Top 50. It has been publicly available since September 11 2008, and the clients for Windows, MacOS and Linux were released simultaneously. It is good to see that Linux was on their radar and is being well looked after.

You can sign up for a free Dropbox account and get 2GB of storage space. The storage space is provided through Amazon using their Simple Storage Service (S3).

When you install the client, you get access to that storage space via a mapped drive. In the case of the Linux client, it maps to your Home directory, so you can access it via /home/<your_username>/Dropbox. That directory contains three sub-directories: Files (which for me shows up as "Hamish's folder"), Photos and Public.

So far, I have installed the client onto two of my machines. Using the same account puts these computers onto the same Dropbox account. All my files then become available across all of my computers.

It's a bit like a mapped drive onto a server, but it is via the Internet and can be accessed from anywhere, including via the Dropbox website. Changes made on one computer are synchronised to the other computer, usually instantly or shortly afterwards. Dropbox only uploads the changed parts of a file, not the file in its entirety (unless its a new file!), so actual transfers can be really quite small.

When you paste files into the folders, they take only the time to upload to the Internet, which is purely dependant on your connection speed (and in Preferences you can limit the upload and download speeds anyway). Once the system has recognised them, they're then available on the other machines.

So how do they achieve this magic and how do you install it? Please read onto page 2...