Changing the Dropbox folder to a normal directory on Ubuntu

EDIT: The newer releases of the Dropbox client (1.2.x and above) has changed the database format into encrypted. The process of the blog post does not work with this newer releases anymore. However, there is a workaround: download the latest available stable 1.1.x version (1.1.35) from here, extract to the empty .dropbox_dist folder and make the the folder read-only for your dropbox user by making root the owner (eg. "sudo chown root:root ~/.dropbox_dist"). This method prevents the dropbox to update itself for newer versions.

I do not like the feature in the Dropbox client: it is not possible to setup a plain directory as DropBox folder, only "../something/Dropbox".

Here the tweak comes. The Dropbox uses sqlite to store the settings:

(0. Install sqlite3 package.)
1. Close the Dropbox client.
2. Go to your Dropbox folder:
cd ~/.dropbox
3. Convert the config.db to plain text
echo '.dump' | sqlite3 config.db > dump.txt
4. Search in dump.txt and edit the dropbox_path field to your desired directory location.
5. Close the dump.txt, delete or rename the old config.db to something else.
6. Convert the database back:
sqlite3 config.db < dump.txt
7. Restart the client and voilá, works.