How to integrate Google Drive in Ubuntu 16.04 (Unity, GNOME or XFCE)

gnome-online-accounts-100614138-orig

GNOME 3.18 brought several important novelties, and one that for quite some time we had in view is that of the integration with Google Drive, the Mountain View company's cloud storage space. The good thing, in this case, is that this feature can also be used in other desktop environments (in Xenial Xerus) such as XFCE or Unity, so let's see some of that in this post.

The idea is to use the Google Drive integration in GNOME 3.18 with Unity or XFCE desktops, all of which can be used in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial XerusThe first, of course, from the fact of being the default desktop, while in the case of the other we can achieve it thanks to the fact that we can install any desktop from repositories or by installing one of the Ubuntu 'flavors', such as Ubuntu GNOME or Xubuntu.

In order to use this Google Drive integration in Unity we are going to need to install the GNOME Control Center, which does not come by default in Ubuntu but is available in the official repositories. So we install it:

sudo apt-get install gnome-control-center

Then we open it, launching it from the Unity dash, from a terminal (the executable file is called gnome-control-center) or from the menus, to later add our Google account, in the online accounts section, making sure that if the "Files" option is activated , as we see in the upper image of this post. And that's it, because we will be able to access our Google docs from Nautilus (or Nemo, if we have installed it).

If we have XFCE, luckily we can also take advantage of the benefits of having integrated Google Drive on the desktop, although in this case we must bear in mind that we need to resolve some dependencies since the GNOME Control Center is based on GNOME 3. It is clear that Apt-get takes care of this, so we will not worry about that since we are well covered in that sense, but we must also bear in mind that in environments other than GNOME or Unity the GNOME Control Center will not appear in the main menu, for which we have to resort to an extra step:

Edit the file /usr/share/applications/gnome-control-center.desktop, and remove "OnlyShowIn = GNOME; Unity".

Then we copy that file to ~ / .local / share / applications /. If that folder does not exist we will have to create it.

gnome-control-center-tweaked-xfce

Now we have to make the GNOME Control Center show all the panels you have available, we have to edit the shortcut and add the option "Env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP = GNOME" between "Exec =" y "Gnome-control-center". We can do it by executing the following from a terminal window (which we open with Ctrl + Alt + T):

sed -i 's / ^ Exec. * / Exec = env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP = GNOME gnome-control-center –overview /' ~ / .local / share / applications / gnome-control-center.desktop.

Now that we have all the panels available, we also have to add our Google account, as we saw when we added this sync in Unity in Xenial Xerus. And after doing so we will finally be able to access our Google data in Thunar.

As we see, the steps to be able take advantage of our Google Drive space on the desktop (be it XFCE or Unity) they are very simple and after finishing we will have direct access to everything we store in google cloud, just as if it were a folder of our team.


8 comments, leave yours

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  1.   waltercahun said

    What nonsense. for many years I waited for him and now I have switched to MEGA XD
    Rot hahaha

  2.   The one below said

    The one above is fucking

  3.   Kriparam said

    Hi i opened that account online from nautilus on ubuntu 16.04 and it was working for me until i changed google password. Then I got a message that was quickly erased referring to a change of credentials as a matter for which it could not be mounted. I deleted the account online and reopened it with the new google password but it keeps giving me the same error.
    Any suggestions?
    Thank you

  4.   reynaldo said

    Will it work for kubuntu 1604 ???

  5.   rubo_k said

    no way to get back to grive on ubuntu 16.04? the google drive application is very slow when loading the files

  6.   xavicuevas said

    When I type in console: /usr/share/applications/gnome-control-center.desktop it tells me "Permission denied", I have entered a lot of forums and I have done everything they say and I could not solve the problem, so I opened a Mega account (which also gives me 50 GB) and I forgot about the Drive.

  7.   loko said

    Xavicuevas, use sudo for god's sake.

    To the rest of MEGA, rot you melons XDDD.

  8.   away said

    Greetings, thanks for the information. Everything works, I managed to enter the credentials of my drive, but I can't see the google drive in the storage devices. Any additional steps?

    Thank you very much for the help