I was recently a little stumped on getting Dropbox working on my Ubuntu 10.10 install (Maverick Meerkat) through our corporate proxy…. having got it working though I thought I’d share with you.
In a terminal start Dropbox with the following command.
dropbox start Starting Dropbox... The Dropbox daemon is not installed! Run "dropbox start -i" to install the daemon
This tells us that the Dropbox daemon needs to be installed… so run the command as suggested
dropbox start -i
This will start the installer and if you have a proxy in the way then this process will throw you an error. What you need to do is specify the proxy settings (including username and password. For some reason setting it via Gnome (System->Preferences -> Network Proxy) does not seem to work and we need to set the Environment variable http_proxy.
export http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy:8080
If you re-run the dropbox start -i command now the install should proceed as required and you’ll have a nice working install of Dropbox running. Note also that during installation it is possible to set the Proxy information that will be used by Dropbox for everyday running so there is no need to put the previously mentioned export command in your .bashrc file.
[jbox color=”blue” vgradient=”#fdfeff|#bae3ff” title=”Get Dropbox”]If you haven’t got Dropbox yet go grab it from here.[/jbox]