(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I would like to install the web synching application Dropbox (www.getdropbox.com/) on my Puppy 4.1 computer, but am not sure how. Apparently it can be done, because a commenter on this blog post said he did just that:

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/bl ... out-gnome/
(the post is about Kubuntu, but the person shown as ¨ST/op" mentions Puppy in the comments)

I tried following the blogger's structions but was unable to get far. The commenter said he had to make a few adjustments to get it to work, but I do not know what these are.

Alternately, could there be a petget for Dropbox, or one made?

Thanks.

Hi Che,

I tried following the same instructions, and it is working without problems...!

Just as a reminder, here is the steps:

1. Download the generic linux binaries here: http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86

2. unpack and put the folder .dropbox-dist in your ~ diretory

3. from terminal run the ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd. This will start a graphical config dialog.

4. make a symbolic link from the ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd to the startup diretory. This will start up the dropbox at X startup.

this worked for me...

where do you encounter problems??? do you get the graphical config dialog???

I just followed Sommer's instructions and it worked perfectly on 4.2 Deep Thought

sommer wrote:Hi Che,
where do you encounter problems??? do you get the graphical config dialog???

Thanks, sommer. For the moment, my Puppy 4.1 is broken, so I haven't gotten back to try this. I am encouraged though that rjcress got it to work on 4.2. I hope to try it at some point and will let you know if I have issues or success. Thanks!

and it worked perfectly on 4.2 Deep Thought

Lucky you

I am using Puppy 4.2 SMP and can not unarchive the file.
Anyone know why this might be?
Perhaps a .pet would work better if someone wishes to construct?

I am uploading a .pet to puppylinux.ca now. Once the upload is complete and Eric lets me know where he has moved it to I will post a link here.
Could be quite a while though. I am on dial-up and it is about 17MB in size.

Hi all,

I would really like to get dropbox working, but so far, no luck...

If I try the instructions from sommer, I get an icon in the tooltray that I cannot do anything with, and a terminal message as follows:
------------
# ./.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
Xlib: unexpected async reply (sequence 0x1fb)!

-------------
I have downloaded the pet from billywho, but I cannot get that to work either. (As I have uninstalled the pet, I cannot now remember the error message !)....

I also needed to install the dbus pet. I had to use the puppy-3 pet, as there does not seem to be one for puppy-4.

I am running Puppy421, full install.

Any ideas ?

Phil

Upload is complete and the pet can be found here
http://puppylinux.ca/tpp/Billwho/dropbo ... 56.md5.txt for the md5sum text file.
http://puppylinux.ca/tpp/Billwho/dropbox-0.65.556.pet for the .pet itself.

This .pet is the same binary install package that Sommer linked to earlier. All I did was place the .dropbox-dist directory in a .pet to allow for easy install and uninstall.
I did add some symlinks to keep the package manager from listing a lot of the included libraries as missing dependencies and added a menu entry in the "Network" section of the menu. But thaqt was the only changes I made.

When I installed and tested it in my Frugal install of 421 it seemed to be working quite well.

UncleBaldie could you double check the md5sum of your copy for me please. I noticed when I was getting the link locations from Pupylinux.ca that the .pet is listed as 16.6Mb but Puppy lists the copy I have on my hard drive as 17Mb. So the upload my not have completed correctly.
In the meantime I will try to find if there is anything else I can find here.

@ Lobster and UncleBaldie
Which window manager are you using? I just tried installing the .pet in a clean Puppy420 (pfix=ram) and JWM. When I started dropbox from the menu I got the icon in the system tray but could not do anything with it. However when I changed window managers to IceWM and restarted dropbox I got not only the icon in the system tray (which opened a pop up menu when I right clicked on it) but also the configuration wizard.

OK everybody this is just getting weirder all the time. When I first installed and tested the .pet I used my local LUG's email address and Dropbox account. When I unlinked my computer from that account I was left with the unresponsive icon in the tray. I tried uninstalling and then re-installing. When that did not work I tried un-installing and then manually removing any left-over files I could find before re-installing again. Then I tried re-installing several times in a row before starting Dropbox from the menu. Nothing worked, I just kept getting the frozen icon. Eventually I came to the conclusion I had completely borked my frugal 421 so decided "what the heck it can't make things worse", changed window managers from IceWM to JWM restarted Dropbox and "blow me down" the damn thing worked. After running the config wizard and setting up my own Dropbox account I changed back in IceWM and restarted. Yes it was still working.

The moral of this story is: If Dropbox does not work when you install it. Change window manager and try again.

If changing window manager doesn't work try logging out of X and then back in. I haven't tested this but it probably can't hurt and may just work.

I don't know why changing WMs helped but am guessing that a stale file somewhere is getting refreshed on the change over.

Thanks, Billwho, that fixed it.

I was using IceWM, so I switched to JWM, clicked on Dropbox, and up came the config screen. Everything went through OK, and there in my home folder is a Dropbox folder.
Switched back to IcewM, still working.

A very peculiar install routine.. ..but it works.

So well done, Billwho.....

Thanks,

Phil

Glad to hear it UncleBaldie.

After thinking about this on and off all day at work, I may have worked out what is going on.

When we installed Dropbox on the LUG's Ubuntu machine there was a dialogue box came up telling us to log out and then back in so it could register itself with Nautilus. I believe that Nautilus is Ubuntu's window manager so maybe when we change WM's in Puppy it is allowing Dropbox to register itself with the WM's.

I may not have had this problem when I was setting up and testing the .pet because I was logging in and out of X to run dir2pet, which may have resulted in Dropbox already being registered with IceWM before I got the menu entry working correctly.

Hey this works and well.

Thanks for all the great tips here.

I'm hoping someone can shed some light on a problem I'm having with Dropbox. I have a hard drive install of Puppy 4.31 and about a month ago I installed Dropbox using Billwho?'s pet file. Everything had been working great.

I don't have Dropbox set to run automatically but instead just launch it when I need it. Yesterday I launched Dropbox and was waiting for it to fetch some files I had uploaded from another machine. Instead of showing that it was syncing my files the Dropbox tray icon said "Updating Dropbox". Eventually Dropbox exited and the tray icon went away. I tried to launch it again, but got nothing. I tried rebooting puppy, but X failed to open and I was dropped back to command line.

After having no luck getting X running again I started searching for files that had changed yesterday in an attempt to track down the problem. What I found was that every file in /root/.dropbox-dist had been changed yesterday and that there were several symlinks from /usr/lib to /root/.dropbox-dist. I had a full backup from a couple of weeks ago so I replaced all of the files in /root/.dropbox-dist with the files from my backup and rebooted. That solved my problem and X now works fine again.

I am assuming that Dropbox was trying to automatically upgrade to a new version, but the upgrade included some lib files that were not compatible with my version of X. I tried searching through the Dropbox files, but can't find any way to prevent if from updating itself again.

Has anyone run into any similar problems or does anyone have any tips for me?

Thanks

Okay, I think I've answered my own questions. Hopefully, if anyone else runs into a similar problem this will help them.

When I installed Dropbox from the .pet file it created symlinks in /usr/lib to the following files in /root/.dropbox-dist:
libasound.so.2
libbz2.so.1.0
libcrypto.so.0.9.8
libdbus-1.so.3
libdbus-glib-1.so.2
libdirect-0.9.so.25
libdirectfb-0.9.so.25
libexpat.so.1
libfusion-0.9.so.25
libncurses.so.5
libpng12.so.0
_librsync.so
libSDL-1.2.so.0
libsqlite3.so.0
libssl.so.0.9.8
libstdc++.so.6
libwx_baseud-2.8.so.0
libwx_baseud_net-2.8.so.0
libwx_baseud_xml-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_adv-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_aui-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_core-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_html-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_qa-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_richtext-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_stc-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_xrc-2.8.so.0
libz.so.1

When Dropbox updated itself
libasound.so.2
libdirect-0.9.so.25
libdirectfb-0.9.so.25
libexpat.so.1
libfusion-0.9.so.25
libwx_gtk2ud_html-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_richtext-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_stc-2.8.so.0
libwx_gtk2ud_xrc-2.8.so.0

were all removed from the .dropbox-dist folder which broke the symlinks. I'm not sure which of these files being missing was causing X not to start, but replacing them fixed my problem with X not starting.

Once things were working again I tried uninstalling the .pet - unfortunately that broke X again because it removed symlinks from /usr/lib. This time instead of putting the symlinks back the way they had been I copied the files into a new directory and created symlinks from /usr/lib to the new location. Once again this fixed X. I tried reinstalling Dropbox from the .pet file and as soon as I launched it the update automatically started again. This time it didn't break X, but it did break Dropbox. Finally I uninstalled Dropbox again. Then I downloaded the generic install from Dropbox and followed sommer's method. Now I have everything working again.

Thanks

Same thing happened to me yesterday. I remembered that Crunchbang Linux Wiki had some instructions on doing a generic install and a link to a zipped .dropbox-dist. I installed that and made a fake nautilus script in my-applications to run rox instead. Hopefully dropbox won't try to update istelf again. Did you get a ,dropbox-dist.new folder created as well when the update ran?

i had success using the .pet file by first creating the "blank document file" named ".dropbox-dist-new" in /root

this keeps the program from updating and creating the .dropbox-dist-new folder.

Has anybody managed to get it working in Puppy 5.01?

I followed Summer's instructions but when I tried to run the dropboxd I got :

locale.Error: unsupported locale settings.
My locale is en_GB

Thanks for any help!

Oh - I also tried to use the ubuntu.deb but all I got was a python installer - and I have no idea how to make that work.

Ah damn it, now I feel like an idiot!
Anyways - changed the locale to use UTF-8 (no idea if this matters or not, I suspect not). Had to restart X-server, of course and now the dropboxd command works.
Well - very pleased that it works of course! But why (when I had tried restarting X) did it only start to work now!
So, ignore my previous post...

I have installed the .pet and run dropboxd, but it doesn't work. The tray icon comes up with an X through it, and I get a screen saying that it can't connect. There is a tab for adjusting the proxy setting, but I don't use a proxy. My wireless internet connection is working fine.

From the install instructions on the dropbox site, I see something about composing an URL using the host ID and a dopbox CLI, none of which I see mentioned here. Is any of that necessary for this .pet?