Installing Dropbox on Debian Sid

I had to install the ubiquitous Dropbox on my Debian Sid box tonight, just thought I’d leave a few notes here to help along someone else who was needing it.

As Dropbox does not provide a Debian package, we’ll use their source package. However, we’ll do it in a way that Dropbox will still be installed under the supervision of the package manager and can still be uninstalled, or installed on other systems at will.

1. Start by downloading the Dropbox source (.tar.gz) from this page
2. Install the dependencies using apt:
   
$ aptitude install libnautilus-extension-dev checkinstall

3. Compile the Dropbox source package:
   
$ ./configure
$ make

4. Create and install a new Debian package from the source install using checkinstall
   
# sudo checkinstall make install

   Just accept the default for the questions, unless you’re building a package for distribution in which case specify the applicable options (i.e. requires)
5. Start dropbox:
   Applications -> Internet -> Dropbox
   OR
   $ dropbox -i

Enjoy!

More tips on installing Dropbox from CLI can be found here.

Edit: Raphaël Hertzog commented below to let us know that he has correctly packaged Dropbox for inclusion in the Debian distribution. Here is his post.