Installing Dropbox on Fedora 27 XFCE

This blog post describes how you can install Dropbox on Fedora 27 XFCE.

Installing pre-requisite packages

Before we can install Dropbox we need to install a number of pre-requisite packages.

The full command to install the required packages is:

sudo dnf install libgnome nautilus-extensions python-gpgme

The first two packages, libgnome and nautilus-extensions, are required by the Dropbox UI. There is the assumption that when installing Dropbox you are running Gnome on Fedora. This means that if you are running Fedora with XFCE then these packages must be installed.

The last package, python-gpgme, is a wrapper around the gpgme command line tool. This allows Dropbox to use the GPG libraries to encrypt and verify data.

Downloading and Installing Dropbox

Once the required packages are installed we need to download the Dropbox rpm. This is available from the Dropbox Linux website https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux

Once the rpm is downloaded you run rpm -i <downloaded rpm>. An example is as follows

rpm -i nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fedora.x86_64.rpm

If the above packages haven’t been installed you may get a Failed dependencies error as below.

chewett@deathstar:~/Downloads$ rpm -i nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fedora.x86_64.rpm
warning: nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fedora.x86_64.rpm: Header V3 RSA/SHA1 Signature, key ID 5044912e: NOKEY
error: Failed dependencies:
libgnome >= %{gnome_version} is needed by nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fc10.x86_64
libnautilus-extension.so.1()(64bit) is needed by nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fc10.x86_64
nautilus-extensions >= 2.16.0 is needed by nautilus-dropbox-2015.10.28-1.fc10.x86_64

If this occurs then you will need to follow the first paragraph detailing how to install the required packages.

Once the rpm install has finished there will be a Dropbox icon in the menu bar. Clicking on this will finish the installation process and start Dropbox.

This should now mean Dropbox is installed successfully and will start to sync your files across.