How to Install Google Drive in Linux Mint / Ubuntu. Google has announced its file storage and synchronization service called Drive but there’s still no official Linux client. There are some unofficial clients, but they’re not perfect: Insync is not free, Grive is command line only and its development seems to have stopped and so on.
So here’s another alternative for easily managing your Google Drive files under Linux: google-drive-ocamlfuse. google-drive-ocamlfuse is a FUSE filesystem backend for Google Drive which you can use to mount your Google Drive under Linux.
Among its features are full read/write support for regular files and folders, multiple account support, duplicate file handling as well as access to the Google Drive trash directory. google-drive-ocamlfuse also provides read-only access to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, which its converts to ODT, ODS of PDF (this can be configured).
google-drive-ocamlfuse is still under testing so while it works pretty well, you may encounter bugs. For instance, in my test, some Google documents weren’t converted for some reason.
It’s also worth mentioning that the changes don’t show up instantly – when you edit or upload a new file, it can take 60 seconds (this is configurable) until the changes show up in the mounted filesystem. If newly added files don’t show up in your file manager, enter the folder again or refresh it (Ctrl + F).
Install google-drive-ocamlfuse in Linux Mint /Ubuntu
Google-drive-ocamlfuse is now available in a PPA. Add the PPA and install it in Linux Mint / Ubuntu using the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/ppasudo apt-get updatesudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse
How to Use it ?
Firstly, you need to authorize google-drive-ocamlfuse with Google. To do this, run the following command:
google-drive-ocamlfuse
This should open a tab in your default web browser, asking to allow google-drive-ocamlfuse to access your Google Drive. Click “Allow”, wait a few seconds for google-drive-ocamlfuse to retrieve the authorization code and you’re done.
Now let’s mount Google Drive. Create a folder in your home directory, let’s call it “gdrive”:
mkdir ~/gdrive
And mount Goole Drive using the command : google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/gdrive
That’s it. If you want to configure the interval between queries to detect server-side changes, the export format used for Google documents and so on, see the configuration file: ~/.gdfuse/default/config
Create A Start Up Program
To mount Google Drive on startup, add “google-drive-ocamlfuse /path/to/gdrive” (replace the “/path/to/ with the exact path to the folder where you want to mount Google Drive) to Startup Applications. For more info, including using multiple accounts, see the google-drive-ocamlfuse wiki.