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Department of Computer Science

Technical Services and Support

Connecting Google Drive to CS Linux Machines

by Hanz Makmur

Google Drive is available as part of ScarletApps and available to everyone at Rutgers, with 30GB of storage that you can use to store your data. These instructions will show you how to connect your Google Drive with CS Linux machines. Once connected, you can store and access files from CS Linux machines on your Google Drive as a mounted drive.

To  connect your Google Drive with CS Linux Machines:

  1. Login to the CS Linux machine using the Gnome window manager. This is not currently possible with X2Go Client. You’ll need to log in personally on the machine to set this up or use Windows Remote Desktop Client to connect.
  2.  Click the Power icon at the top right corner of the screen, and a menu will be shown.
  3. Click on icon to access the Settings Window
  4. Look for  icon and click it to open the Online Accounts windows.
  5. To start connecting your Google Drive account, click on  under Add an account section, a login window will open asking you to login to Google. Enter your Google mail address. For regular Google account, you would normally need to enter your gmail address. Example:  but for Rutgers ScarletApps, the email would be your 
  6. For users with @scarletmail.rutgers.edu address, another familiar windows will open asking you to enter your credential on Central Authentication Server (CAS) Login screen. Please enter your NetID and Password and click the  button.
  7. If you entered the correct credentials, a window below will open informing you that Linux Gnome wants to access things listed. Click the  button to continue
  8. Once authorized, a window showing all Google services that can be accessed by Linux Gnome is presented to you as below. Feel free to turn off things you don’t want Gnome to access after you test them.
  9.  The setup is completed. You can close this Online Accounts window now. To  access your Google Drive, look under Gnome menu and select the item with Google account name listed in the menu to access it.
  10. The mount point is  /run/user/UID/gvfs/google-drive:host=scarletmail.rutgers.edu,user=yourNetID]$ , where UID is your numerical user ID. (You can use the “id” command if you don’t know it.) In that directory you’ll see all the external services mounted through Gnome.  However the content looks like unreable via command line.  We recommend that you use drag/drop of Nautilus. Nautilus is able to interpret the character lists, but Calibre, OpenOffice and others cannot. There are other tools available, but they don’t look like anything we’d want to support on our public systems.

For help with our systems or If you need immediate assistant, visit LCSR Operator at CoRE 235 or call 848-445-2443. Otherwise, see CS HelpDesk. Don’t forget to include your NetID along with descriptions of your problem.