14 DAY TRIAL // Dropbox 2.7.42 experimental version, a client for an online service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere, has been released and it's now ready for testing.
The new experimental build of the Dropbox client is now ready for download and this is the second time in a week when the Dropbox developers decide to make some improvements to the client. As you might have picked up until now, the Linux client is not exactly the most popular version and gets few fixes and improvements.
The last couple of releases, even if they were in the development branch of the client, saw the introduction of a few important fixes. One of those fixes even reduced the CPU usage and disk I/O (read and write) usage, which can only be good news for Linux users.
According to the changelog, an issue affecting the "Dropbox start" and "Dropbox stop" commands on Linux has been fixed. Even if this doesn't seem like an important fix, it's actually something that has been bothering Linux users for quite some time.
Also, a rare issue that caused Dropbox to crash on shutdown has been corrected, a problem that caused Dropbox to take a long time to shut down has been fixed, and a number of other smaller fixes have been implemented.
So far, the developers have great plans for this particular branch of Dropbox. They plan to introduce pre-authorized installers for Windows and Mac OS X, some way of notifying the user when their hard disk is full, a native UI for shared folder invitation and management (there is no mention of different platforms for this features, so we can assume that it will be present for all), and new icons in the tray popup have been implemented.
You have to keep in mind that Dropbox 2.7.42 is a development version and that it will take a while to get into the official repositories, after it is promoted to stable. As is stands right now, you can only run the application manually and you can't add a PPA or have any other kind of installation (with the exception of Arch Linux probably). If you want a more permanent solution, you will have to wait for the official, stable release.
Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only. Download Dropbox 2.7.42 Experimental for Linux