Dropbox 1.0 was released a few days ago.

As you may recall, dropbox is a “cloud storage” service with 2 GB of free storage which you can expand (for free) by referring dropbox to your friends, or by paying a monthly fee.

There is no new client package available. The version 1.0.10 is an update to the closed-source daemon process. New features are: selective sync (you can exclude certain subdirectories in your main dropbox from synchronizing with the server) and the sync process can be paused if you need that. There are supposedly speed enhancements but I have not witnessed those yet. I am always amazed at the speed at which the server sync works anyway.

So, how do you update the Dropbox daemon to version 1.0.10 if you cannot download a newer client package?

The steps are really simple: stop dropbox, remove the daemon’s directory entirely, and start dropbox again:

$ dropbox stop
Stopping Dropbox…Done
$ dropbox status
Dropbox isn’t running!
$ rm -r ~/.dropbox-dist/
$ dropbox start -i
Starting Dropbox…Done

The dropbox client will ask you if it can download the daemon again, and if you click OK, it will do so (which will not take long at all). After the download dialog disappears, check your dropbox icon in the system tray – it will show version “1.0.10” and the “Pause syncing” will be clearly visible in the right-mouseclick popup menu.

My dropbox client packages for Slackware: http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/dropbox-client/ .

Make sure you get a version of my dropbox-client package that is at least 0.6.7. If you have a Slackware without Gnome (and thus without the nautilus file manager) you also have to overwrite an older version of the script “/usr/bin/nautilus” which is installed by my dropbox-client package, with the newer version “/usr/bin/nautilus.new”. That script contains a compatibility fix for the new dropbox daemon. If you forget this, you will notice that clicking the dropbox icon will not start a file manager, and if you ran dropbox start -i” from the commandline you will see the error “xdg-open: unexpected option ‘–no-desktop’“.

If you want to try a dropbox account yourself, please use this referral link to create and start using it. In that case, both you and I will receive an additional 500 MB of storage for free on top of the standard 2 GB: http://db.tt/Rv5417bY

Have fun! Eric