Well, since my last post I’ve been attempting to get Dropbox working on CentOS (since this is my server platform). I have so many potential uses for having dropbox running on my server that I’d probably bore anyone reading this if I listed them. Needless to say, it’d be very useful for me if Dropbox would work.

Rather than run the installation on my live server(s), I decided to do a test install on a Virtual Machine. I fired up VMWare and created a minimal installation of CentOS (and I mean minimal) and after installing VMware tools I installed the GNOME desktop along with the X11 Window Manager. I normally use KDE, but unfortunately Dropbox only currently supports Nautilus and not Konqueror .

yum --exclude=nautilus-sendto groupinstall 'X Window System' 'GNOME Desktop Environment'

Now, officially CentOS is not supported by Dropbox, there are no packages for CentOS provided by Dropbox so I thought I’d get the source and see what I could do with it. The package requirements are higher than the CentOS package versions available through traditional channels. I thought I’d have a pop anyway and document how far I got here. The two key problems are that Dropbox require glib2 version to be at least 2.14.0 and libnotify needs to be at least 0.4.4. CentOS 5.2 (current release at time of writing) only has packages for glib2 at 2.12.3-2 and libnotify at 0.4.2-6. I wasn’t about to let that stop my potential enjoyment of Dropbox though, so I installed the other dependencies using yum:

yum install bzip2 wget make gtk+-devel libnotify-devel nautilus-extensions.i386 nautilus-devel.i386 gnome-vfs2-devel compat-glibc-headers.i386 compat-glibc.i386 gnome-desktop-devel.i386

Then I got the latest source from the DropBox download page and untarred it:

wget http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/5143/nautilus-dropbox-packages/0.4.1/nautilus-dropbox-0.4.1.tar.bz2
tar jxf nautilus-dropbox-0.4.1.tar.bz2

Next, I had to alter the configure script to accept our versions of glib2 and libnotify which was just a matter of finding and replacing

GLIB_REQUIRED=2.14.0
LIBNOTIFY_REQUIRED=0.4.4

with

GLIB_REQUIRED=2.12.0
LIBNOTIFY_REQUIRED=0.4.2

Then I ran the

./configure
make
make install

Everything seemed to compile ok. Time to fire up the desktop… GNOME launched ok, but nautilus refuses to load. The problem is revealed when trying to start nautilus from the command line:

[rob@localhost ~]$ nautilus /home/rob
Initializing nautilus-dropbox 0.4.1
nautilus: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-1.0/libnautilus-dropbox.so: undefined symbol: g_timeout_add_seconds

It looks like Dropbox really does require the specified versions of those packages which is a real shame. So in short, unless anyone comes up with a workaround, or Dropbox release a more compatible version it looks like there’s no awesomeness to be had with Dropbox and CentOS / RHEL

Never-the-less the awesomeness still reigns on the Windows platform!