I recently switched to Kubuntu and am falling in love with it, but I’ll talk more about that in a future post. This post is just about getting the Dropbox “Get public link” functionality working in Dolphin’s right-click menu. Under Gnome and Unity the default file manager in Nautilus so this functionality works after the standard nautilus-dropbox install, but KDE uses Dolphin as its file manager so we have to do a little bit of fiddling after the standard install to get it working.
I came across an old Dropbox forum post that has a simple way of adding the public link in the right-click menu. The final working version is scattered across a few posts and a blog, so I thought I’d pull it all together here for the rest of you migrating to KDE.
As usual, it’s pretty simple once you have it figured out. All you have to do is put a single file with the right commands in the right place. So open your favorite text editor and create the following file: ~/.kde/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/dropboxpublic.desktop . Then paste all of this stuff into it and save it:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin
MimeType=application/octet-stream
Actions=CopyPublicLink
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=0.1
[Desktop Action CopyPublicLink]
Name=Get public link
Icon=klipper
Exec=dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=org.kde.klipper /klipper org.kde.klipper.klipper.setClipboardContents string:`dropbox puburl %f`
Now you should have a “Get public link” entry in the Actions sub-menu if you right-click a file in Dolphin. This will put the public URL in your clipboard so it’s ready to paste into your web browser, email client, IRC session, or whatever. Usually only files in the ~/Dropbox/Public directory have a public links, so if you use it on something outside of that directory nothing will be added to your clipboard.
P. S.
The original forum post is here: http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=12034&replies=2#post-76494
And the original blog post is here: http://ustunozgur.blogspot.com/2009/09/kde-submenu-action-for-getting-public.html
P. P. S.
If you’re not a Dropbox user, but you’d like to be, please use this Dropbox referral URL to sign up. If you do, you’ll get an extra 250MB of storage for free, and I’ll get and extra 500MB.Thanks!
