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 executemake, 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 :)