Installing Dropbox From Source Code

If you are installing Dropbox from source code, you must have read this help page. It is not a detailed documentation. You might run into few well known issues.

From my experience of installing Dropbox on Arch Linux,

• Download the source code from official repository
• Extract the tarball tar xvjf ./nautilus-dropbox-1.4.0.tar.bz2
• Switch your working directory to the extracted source code directory
  cd ./nautilus-dropbox-1.4.0
• Make sure that you are using python2(docgen.py uses execfile() function which is deprecated in python3). Dropbox installation is not supported by python3
• Run ./configure
• Copy the dropbox.in file to dropbox
  cp dropbox.in dropbox
  We do this because, when you execute make, docgen.py will depend on a file named “dropbox” but it is present as “dropbox.in” in the source code
• Run make
• When I ran make I ran into another error from “dropbox” file. Around line 285
  box_logo_pixbuf = @IMAGEDATA64@
  window_icon = @IMAGEDATA16@
  it was not able to resolve @IMAGEDATA64@ and @IMAGEDATA16@ but as these are just icon and logo images I commented out these lines.
• Run make install

Have fun with Dropbox :)