Mount Box on Linux — NetDrive's Experimental Ubuntu Build

A small platform team standardized its internal runbooks and architecture diagrams in Box years ago, and half the team now runs Ubuntu on their workstations. Every time someone needs to check a diagram from a shell script or open it with a Linux-native tool, they’ve been pulling it through the Box web UI and re-uploading edits by hand. NetDrive’s Linux build mounts that same Box account at a regular mount point, so a script reading /mnt/box/runbooks/incident-response.md gets the current file straight from Box.

Mount Box on Ubuntu

NetDrive lets Google Drive, OneDrive, S3, SFTP, WebDAV and more appear as native drives on Windows and macOS — no syncing, no full downloads.

• Runs on Ubuntu 16.04 and later
• Mounts your Box account at a Linux mount point — no separate sync folder
• Same Box account works across Windows, macOS, and Linux

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Box on NetDrive’s Linux Build

Box has been one of NetDrive’s supported providers since its earliest 3.x release in September 2017, alongside Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox. On Windows and macOS that support is treated as production-grade; on Linux, it carries NetDrive’s own experimental label — a designation that applies to the entire Linux build, not to any single provider. Windows and macOS remain the hardened, more heavily tested targets.

NetDrive for Linux isn’t distributed through a distro’s package manager. It ships as a GitHub release at github.com/NetDrive/installer, and Ubuntu 16.04 is the minimum supported version.

Installing NetDrive on Ubuntu

1. Go to github.com/NetDrive/installer and download the release that matches your Ubuntu version.
2. Follow the release notes bundled with that build — a driver component needs to install before NetDrive can mount anything, and the process may prompt for sudo.
3. Install the NetDrive package.
4. Launch NetDrive from a terminal or your desktop environment’s application menu.

Because updates ship as GitHub releases instead of through apt upgrade, the Linux build is maintained on its own release schedule — a fix that ships for Windows or macOS this week isn’t guaranteed to land on Linux the same week. Worth noting in whatever runbook covers the box running it.

Step-by-Step: Connect Your Box Account

1. Open NetDrive’s Drive Manager and click + Add Drive.
2. Select Box from the list of connection types.
3. Sign in with your Box credentials when the authorization screen appears, and approve NetDrive’s access request.
4. Set a mount point — a path like /mnt/box, or any empty directory your user account can write to.
5. Click Connect. NetDrive authenticates against Box and mounts the account at that path.

If your organization manages Box through an enterprise or managed user account, confirm with your Box admin that third-party app access is allowed before the authorization step — some managed Box tenants restrict which apps can connect.

Verifying the Mount and Common Issues

Check the mount from a terminal instead of relying on a file manager alone, particularly on an experimental build:

# Confirm the mount is listed
mount | grep box

# Or just try listing it
ls /mnt/box

Authorization screen doesn’t load — this is usually a network or firewall issue on the Ubuntu host rather than a Box problem; confirm outbound HTTPS is reachable from that machine before retrying.

Mount point stays empty after Connect — check that the directory exists and is writable by the user running NetDrive. An unwritable or missing mount point is the most common cause of a silent failure on Linux.

Files show up but edits don’t save — this usually points to a permissions mismatch on the local mount point rather than a Box-side restriction; re-check the directory’s ownership.

Wrap-up

Mounting Box on Ubuntu brings the same drive-style access NetDrive offers on Windows and macOS to a Linux workstation, through an installer distributed on GitHub rather than a package repository. For the broader Linux picture, see NetDrive on Ubuntu Linux; for the same provider on a more heavily tested platform, see Mount Box on Windows; and for another connection type on the Linux build, see Mount a WebDAV Server on Linux.

— Kai, NetDrive