Dropbox Meets Gentoo

So I’m a big Dropbox user. I primarily use it to keep my personal info synchronized between my machines (don’t worry, I encrypt my stuff before dumping it into Dropbox, I’m not dumb), but it’s also handy for quickly sharing files with others.

Unfortunately, Dropbox doesn’t exist in the Gentoo portage tree.

To get started, head over to the Dropbox website and download the source tar.bzip file for your platform. Unzip it to your desktop, open a root terminal and cd into the resulting directory. Before you can actually install Dropbox, you’ll need to satisfy a few dependencies.

First, make sure that you’ve got python by typing emerge python into the aforementioned root terminal. Next, install docutils by typing emerge docutils in that same terminal. Now you should be able to install the dropbox stub by typing ./configure && make && make install.

At this point, Dropbox will have installed a stub of an application on your machine. You should be able to find it under Applications > Internet > Dropbox. When you launch this application, Dropbox will attempt to automatically download and install the binary portion of the application.

Optional: Verifying Binary Signatures

When dropbox downloads binary files, it verifies their legitimacy by calculating a digital signature and comparing it to a known value. In order for it to perform this task, you’ll need to have the pygpgme library installed on your system. Note that this is not the same as the python-gpgme library. They are different, and Dropbox requires the former. Like most Python libraries, pygpgme is a wrapper around a c-based library, in this case, GPGME. As such, the installation takes two steps. First, run emerge gpgme in your root terminal.

Second, you’ll need to install the pygpgme wrapper. It can be found on the project’s homepage at Launchpad. Unpack the tar.bzip, cd into the resulting directory, and run python setup.py build && python setup.py install from a root terminal. If the installation fails with an error message like

fatal error: gpgme.h: No such file or directory

then check the location of your gpgme.h file. It should have been included with the emerge gpgme command, but pygpgme expects it to live in /usr/include/. On my system, it was living in  /usr/include/gpgme/. I solved this problem by running cp /usr/include/gpgme/gpgme.h /user/include/. The only catch is that if you upgrade GPGME, you’ll need to remember that you copied the header file in order to make the python wrapper work. Once the file is copied, you should be able to run the setup script above.

Finally, run Dropbox and check to ensure that the warning message about binary signatures has gone away. You should now be good to go!

 

Edit: After I had figured all of this crap out, I realized that Dropbox actually is available in the Gentoo tree, but it’s called gnome-extra/nautilus-dropbox. You should be able to skip all of these steps and install Dropbox with the command emerge nautilus-dropbox, although I haven’t tried it myself.