How to run Dropbox daemon in background?

Question

I'm using Debian 6 and Dropbox. I followed these commands to install it.

When I run ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd — Dropbox works and stuff. Problem is that when I close terminal or, even worse, — reboot... Dropbox stops to work and I need to run that deamon again.

Are there any way I say to computer to automatically start that daeamon in background?

Answer 1

If you're running the daemon from your own account, start it at boot time with Cron. Run crontab -e to edit your crontab file and add the line

@reboot ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

Answer 2

run the command in this way:

($HOME/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd &)&

this will detach the process from tha actual terminal and put it in real background.

You will still have to start it back up manually after a reboot, though.

Answer 3

I added the following lines to the end of my .profile file. I prefer to have the computer boot at terminal. However, if I start X11 after this, the dropbox applet is not displayed on the system tray.

dropbox running
rv=$?
if [ $rv -eq 0 ]; then
    dropbox start;
fi