When I bought a new laptop recently, the first thing I did was reformat the hard drive and install Linux Mint. Compared to the fail that Windows 8 is, Linux Mint has been delightful to use. But there are still occasionally bizarre barriers that prevent me from recommending that my wife or other people I know give it a try.
For example, this week I wanted to access my Google Drive account on my laptop, and after a bit of searching SyncDrive seemed like the best solution. Except after following the instructions for installation on the SyncDrive website, I kept getting an error message that the software couldn’t run because a “file or directory doesn’t exist.”
A quick Google search found others who ran into the same problem and a possible solution.
The problem is that syncdrive tries to access an update file at pear-news.fr which has now moved to syncdrive.fr. Fortunately this is easy to overcome.
Use a hex editor such as Bless (available in Software Manager) as root and open the file /usr/bin/syncdrive. Then replace pear-news.fr by syncdrive.fr in 3 places and save.
Syncdrive should then run correctly.
Okay, yes, I know how to do that (and was able to get SyncDrive to work), but I can just imagine telling my wife or co-worker, “see, all you need to do is grab a hex editor and do a search and replace . . .” Um, no. Not going to happen.