Let me say that I would consider myself a noob, but I'm also a diehard Debian fan. Probably my most involved project to date was building my own Xfce-based minimalist Wheezy install on my aging laptop. I started with a bare bones net install, then added everything from xorg on up and I've been very satisfied with the results. One issue I encountered, however, was that I couldn't seem to find a straightforward guide to installing Dropbox (which relies on Nautilus by default) with Thunar and Xfce. I found two excellent guides online that I basically mashed together with flawless results on my laptop thus far.
I'm just the guy that found these two great references and stiched them together in the hopes that it might help someone else with this similar niche case in the future. All credit goes to Z-obsolete for his excellent guide on the CrunchBang wiki, and Boot for his outstanding post on his blog Tillamook Rage for the information and scripting below.
http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/howto/h ... up_dropbox
http://tillamookrage.blogspot.com/2007/ ... e-way.html
Finally, I am certainly open to any comments or thoughts for improvement. My solution is certainly a bit hackish, so any ideas to improve are certainly welcome! Now, on with the guide....
DROPBOX INSTALLATION
1. Download the package at http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86.
2. Extract and move .dropbox-dist to ~/.dropbox-dist.
FAKE NAUTILUS SCRIPT
Our fist step is to create a fake Nautilus script that will actually launch Thunar when Dropbox requests it. The script will go in ~/bin (so make sure you've created the directory first if necessary). In your favorite terminal emulator + text editor:
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touch ~/bin/dropbox_thunar.sh && chmod +x ~/bin/dropbox_thunar.sh && mousepad ~/bin/dropbox_thunar.sh &
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#!/bin/bash
exec thunar ~/Dropbox
# exec thunar $@ doesn't work as thunar doesn't allow --no-desktop option
exit 0
MAKE DROPBOX START AT LOGIN
Now, we'll set up Xfwm to automatically start the Dropbox daemon at login.
First, we'll create the script that will be referenced below when Xfce starts up (I called it "dropbox_autostart.sh" and I put it in its own dir "autostart" under ~/bin).
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mousepad ~/bin/dropbox_autostart.sh &
Paste in the following to set up some safeguards in case an application calls on /usr/bin/nautilus, and of course, start the Dropbox daemon:
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# Just in case some random app calls on Nautilus, lets set some safeguards to minimize the impact:
# Disable Nautilus desktop, because we really really do not want it!
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop false &
# Do not let Nautilus set the background, because we really really do not want this either.
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/background/draw_background false &
# Make Nautilus use spatial mode, should start-up quicker.
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_browser false &
# Make Nautilus show the advanced permissions dialog -- if it has to start, lets at least make it usable :)
gconftool-2 -s -t bool /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_advanced_permissions true &
# And finally...
# ...start dropbox daemon.
(sleep 2s && ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd) &
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Encoding=UTF-8
Name=dropbox_autostart
GenericName=Dropbox
Comment=running autostart script to hack dropbox into working
Exec=bash /home/username/bin/dropbox_autostart.sh
Icon=
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=
OnlyShowIn-XFCE;
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bash -c "(sleep 2s && ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd) &"
Dropbox should now autostart without invoking Nautilus!