Introduction

Dropbox is an on-line service that stores files for users in an account, which they can then access from a number of client applications. The clients include a web site, mobile phone clients for various platforms, and a number of PC clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

You can find the PC clients for Linux here:

https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux

Installing the Linux client is normally pretty trivial, however if you happen to be using an older version of Fedora like I am, you might running into this error when you try to install the RPM for Fedora:

Missing Dependency: libgio-2.0.so.0 is needed by package nautilus-dropbox-0.6.3-1.fc10.i386 (/home/jcollins/Download/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.3-1.fedora.i386.rpm)

nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1-1.fc9.i386: requires: libgio-2.0.so.0

Installing the missing dependencies on Fedora 8

In order to progress, you will need to install the missing dependencies. Begin by downloading these files:

glib2-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm

glib2-static-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm

glib2-debuginfo-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm

glib2-devel-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm

Then run the following command as the root user:

$ rpm -U glib2-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm glib2-static-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm glib2-debuginfo-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm glib2-devel-2.18.2-1jv.fc8.i386.rpm

Finally, you should now be able to install the Dropbox client:

$ rpm -i nautilus-dropbox-0.6.3-1.fedora.i386.rpm

Conclusion

Dropbox are currently offering 2 GB of on-line storage space for free, with a referral scheme to increase that in 250 MB increments for each new user you refer to the service. After that, they offer much larger storage capacities for a monthly fee.

I have been very impressed with the ease of use of the service so far. You just drag-and-drop a file into a local directory, and it syncs up with your on-line account in the background automatically.

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Updated 2021 : note that the above post was originally published in 2010, but is left here for archival purposes. As this tutorial is very old, I am assuming that the above instructions are out-of-date, therefore please don't use them.