Andrea Olivato’s Blog

Dropbox is unquestionably a convenient utility for any Desktop Environment. For those who don’t know it, it’s a file sync service, useful to share files beetween two or more computers and keep them syncronized. It’s useful, for example, when you need to
keep your home computer up to date with the work one.

I used to make an intensive use of dropbox last year, but then I switched from Gnome to Fluxbox in my Gentoo work installation and stopped using Nautilus and its dropbox plugin. Since then I began starting Dropbox manually launching Nautilus when I needed to sync the files. That was really annoying…

Yesterday reading Francesco’s blog, I discovered Dropbox wiki and that it was possible to launch it from the command line! As I had it already installed on nautilus it was just a matter of starting the daemon, and that can be easily achieved by using a  python script .

The script can do a lot of things, such as installing the daemon on a non graphical environment, but I just use it to start the daemon on fluxbox startup.

Here’s how I did it on fluxbox:

1. Download the python script

cd ~ && wget https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/43645/dbcli.py

2. Open the fluxbox start script

vim .fluxbox/startup

3. Find this line

exec fluxbox

4. Before that, insert

exec python dbcli.py status &

Yes, it’s that easy! And we just have to thank Filip L. who published this script on Dropbox forums..

If you are interested on knowing all the fantastic feature of Filip’s script please have a look at DropBox wiki page