Can't start dropbox on Ubuntu 18.04

Question

It is working well in Ubuntu 16.04. After upgrading to 18.04 it refuses to start.

Anyone has any idea ?

Answer 1

I had the same problem (tried it also with a fresh installation, same thing). It turned out to be a locale issue (apparently, dropbox does not install well with some locales). You can check your locale by running

locale

and find out which locales are available for you by running

locale -a

I've managed to install dropbox properly after changing my locale to EN_GB.utf8 (was EN_IL beforehand) by running

sudo update-locale LANG=EN_GB.utf8
sudo update-locale LANGUAGE=EN_GB.utf8

I guess that you can change your locale back to what suits you best after the installation.

Answer 2

You can try the following:

1. Rename current installation of DropBox in your home folder:

    dropbox stop
    mv ~/.dropbox-dist ~/.dropbox-dist_old
    mv ~/.dropbox ~/.dropbox_old
   

2. Reinstall nautilus-dropbox package and reconfigure it:

   sudo apt-get purge nautilus-dropbox
   sudo apt-get install nautilus-dropbox
   sudo dpkg-reconfigure nautilus-dropbox
   

3. Install DropBox daemon in the home folder:

   dropbox start -i
   

Answer 3

I opened language support, it asked me to install additional languages. Installed, restarted and it worked :)

Answer 4

I use anaconda but dropbox wants to use /usr/bin/python3. I have to modify the first line of /usr/bin/dropbox from /usr/bin/env python3 into /usr/bin/python3.

Answer 5

I was able to run dropbox into indicator panel on mate ubuntu 18.04 with this command /usr/bin/caja-dropbox export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity && caja-dropbox start -i It followed from guide on removal of double icon from skype

Answer 6

If you're using Mate desktop you should try to uninstall nautilus-dropbox and install caja-dropbox. It worked for me a moment ago.

Answer 7

I had exactly the same problem. It was indeed to do with the locale settings. But I couldn't change it using the terminal (I live in Germany and that was the only option available), so I changed the language preferences using settings from dashboard

then changed the language preference there language preferences from settings

after a restart dropbox installed immediately

Answer 8

Seems a problem related to Python. Change it from "python" to "python2" and config the autostart It worked perfectly to me

sudoedit /usr/bin/dropbox
--- #! /usr/bin/python
+++ #! /usr/bin/python2

dropbox autostart