How to get Dropbox working on a CR48 Google Chrome netbook

18Feb linux 7 comments

So, sometimes using the web-based Dropbox interface just won’t cut it and downloading individual files from there to upload elsewhere is a pain. I thought it would be pretty cool to have a local cache of my Dropbox on my CR48, and as it turns out, that’s not too hard.

  1. Put your CR-48 in developer mode
  2. Drop into a shell (Ctrl+Alt+t, then shell),
    make your home partition executable with

    sudo mount -i -o remount,exec /home/chronos/user
  3. Get the stable 32bit Dropbox tarball 
    wget -O dropbox.tar.gz "http://www.dropbox.com/download/?plat=lnx.x86"
  4. Extract the archive. 
    tar -xvzf dropbox.tar.gz
  5. Run dropboxd: 
    ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
  6. You should see something like this: 
    This client is not linked to any account...
Please visit https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link?host_id=7d44a557aa58f285f2da0x67334d02c1
to link this machine.

    Copy that URL by highlighting and middle clicking it, and paste it into Chrome. Log in and link your account. It will then create a ~/Dropbox folder and start syncing. If you want to put your Dropbox folder somewhere else, say on an SD card, I’d suggest softlinking ~/Dropbox.

    You’ll want to edit your .bashrc to make the mount point executable and to start Dropbox. Here’s mine: http://signalnine.net/.bashrc.cr48

About the author

Written by

Gabe Ortiz is a systems architect and engineer from Albuquerque, NM.

7 Responses

  1. The only thing with this is if you exit shell, then drop back into it, it tries to start dropboxd again. might want to put a try/catch in there. also, if you put a check to see if they have that dropbox-dist folder, then try to start it (so it will just ignore it if they don’t have it installed, maybe throw a link to this post in .bashrc), throw me a pull request and i’ll put this in the repo.

  2. Made your suggested changes and submitted a pull request.

  3. i’ve tried a couple times pasting the link successfully (dropbox.com shows “localhost” added) but when i get back to shell to start the daemon it reprompts me with a new URL

    do i run the sudo cmd again when i reenter shell before starting daemon?? thanks.

  4. Solved my problem – i missed the point that dropboxd has to continue running while the https link is hit. Didn’t realize that i could use Alt+Tab to toggle out of shell back to Chrome. I was exiting shell and crosh. Anyway, thanks for this great tutorial.

  5. Oh, good. Yeah, I should make that bit a little more explicit in my tutorial. I am also working on getting dropbox.py working, will update when that happens.

  6. Looks like I’m a little late to this party. I just hacked my way through installing Dropbox on the Cr-48 and I had a question. Making the user folder executable removes a layer of security in ChromeOS. Is there a way to move the binary somewhere that’s executable so we don’t have to remount?

  7. jmitzimberg :

    Looks like I’m a little late to this party. I just hacked my way through installing Dropbox on the Cr-48 and I had a question. Making the user folder executable removes a layer of security in ChromeOS. Is there a way to move the binary somewhere that’s executable so we don’t have to remount?

    Well, your root partition is executable but not writable by default. You can remount it read-write and put the dropbox executable there instead, but then you’ll have to reinstall it every time you update ChromeOS. I don’t think the security issue of having an executable home directory is significant.

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