Right now, through March 23, Box.net is running a promotion to give you a free 50 GB for life (instead of their normal 5 GB) if you signup through their Android application. If you don’t know, Box.net offers cloud file storage and sync, much like Dropbox. Personally, I prefer to use Spideroak, but I figured I’d give it a shot for a free 50 GB. Now I’m not going to be uploading 50 GB of documents from my Android, so the real question was how do I use it under Linux?
I’m currently running
Linux Mint 12 KDE, but these instructions will also work under Ubuntu 11.10 and anything fairly new. Before you worry, Box has actually made it REALLY easy to use under Linux.
- Launch your favorite terminal application (or switch to TTY).
sudo apt-get install davfs2sudo mkdir /media/box.netsudo mount -t davfs https://www.box.net/dav /media/box.net- Enter your username (email address) and password
That’s it! As I said, easy. Just make sure to use https otherwise dav will fail with a “302 Found”. If you want to have this mounted at boot time (I don’t, since I’m using a laptop on Wi-Fi), you can check out Benjamin Kerensa’s instructions. Also as a warning, at least on my machine, df -h reports some strange information for that DAV mount (ex: I’ve yet to use a single byte of Box and it reports me using 50% of 26GB — when I have 50GB).