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Dropbox in Ubuntu "Dropbox isn't running! Dropbox is already running!"

rodduarte

Dear Dropbox community

I have been struggling with my Dropbox on Ubuntu for a while now. The icon on the system tray had disappeared, but files were still syncing. I tried a couple of things to make the icon come back, according to previous users who experieced similar scenario. It did not work, and now I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 (from 17.04). I removed Dropbox, reinstalled it and Dropbox won't even open anymore. When I start it from the command line, it says

"Dropbox isn't running!

Dropbox is already running!"

Now I am getting this error when starting Dropbox (although it won't start, it justs loads the process):

Gtk-Message: 08:12:04.932: Failed to load module "overlay-scrollbar"
Done!
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rodrigo/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-51.4.66/PyQt5.QtDBus.so'

(dropbox:3330): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 08:12:04.974: cannot register existing type 'GdkDisplayManager'

(dropbox:3330): GLib-CRITICAL **: 08:12:04.974: g_once_init_leave: assertion 'result != 0' failed

(dropbox:3330): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 08:12:04.974: g_object_new_with_properties: assertion 'G_TYPE_IS_OBJECT (object_type)' failed

When I click on the Dropbox icon in the apps page, nothing happens. Any ideas?

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Walter

Hey there @rodduarte - sorry to hear about this.

Could you give our offline installer a go and let me know if you still get this error? In that case, please forward a screenshot of it in your next reply as well.

Thanks in advance.

ldamico

Hi,

I have the exact same issue (on Ubuntu 18.04), using the offline installer as suggested did not work unfortunately. It gave back the same error as in the original post.

Walter

Hey there @ldamico - sorry to hear about this.

Can you try a complete, clean advanced re-install for me and let me know how this goes?

Just a few things to note here:

1. Make sure you're running our software on a supported configuration as per this article which also provides more information on the system requirements for installing on Linux machines. In this page you'll find the libraries you need to have installed as well for Dropbox to run smoothly on your device.

2. Make also sure that the drive you're installing our software is of a supported format and preferably on your primary drive (meaning the one your OS is installed on): For Dropbox to work best you should make sure that the drive is formatted as NTFS (Windows), HFS (Mac OS X) or a file system that supports extended attributes (Linux) such as EXT3, EXT4 or even BtrFS .

Let me know what you find and we'll take it from there. Thank you!

ldamico

Hi Walt3r, thanks for your help!

I ran the procedure:

One thing that happened is this:

leonardo@leonardo-ThinkPad-X270:~$ rm -rf /var/lib/dropbox
rm: cannot remove '/var/lib/dropbox': Permission denied

I solved it using sudo rm -rf /var/lib/dropbox

Another thing is:

leonardo@leonardo-ThinkPad-X270:~$ rm /etc/apt/source.d/dropbox
rm: cannot remove '/etc/apt/source.d/dropbox': No such file or directory

After that, I have installed from .deb, I clicked Dropbox icon, it downloads the software, updates and then tells me Dropbox Start Required: I click Start Dropbox a few times but it is not responsive.

I do find a dropbox process in system monitor which however is in Sleeping status.

After 10mins or so of idleness I closed the window, killed the process, and reopened Dropbox by clicking on the icon. The process restarted but I saw nothing, unfortunately and now in system monitor is in sleeping status.

Should I try to install dropbox-nautilus by sudo apt-get?

Walter

Thanks for keeping me posted Leonardo ( @ldamico)!

Sorry to hear this persists for you. Maybe try installing the latest build of Qt5? Also, did you check all of my suggestions in my previous communication? Can you make sure that you have all the required libraries for our software to run?

Bear in mind that Dropbox uses Qt 5.5, and as such needs the following software to work on desktop environments:

GTK 2.12 or higher
GLib 2.22 or higher
Libnotify 0.4.4 or higher
Libappindicator 1.0
Nautilus 2.30.0 or higher

In addition, I have located your support ticket with our team and passed your comments here along to the expert handling your case. They will get back to you with an update on this via email.

Should you need anything else, just let me know!

ldamico

Hi Walt3r! Thanks for your help, sorry for my incomplete answer: yes, I have checked 1 and 2 from your previous post and it was working.

I have installed the latest Qt build from their website (downloaded their latest installer following the link from here: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/gettingstarted.html)

Upon running: qmake --version

I get the following output:
QMake version 3.0
Using Qt version 5.6.2 in /home/leonardo/anaconda3/lib

So I would be sure that Qt is installed. Perhaps having it in anaconda3/lib could be a problem for the Dropbox installer?

Thanks!

ldamico

Edit:

I tried the command line headless installation and I still see

(dropbox:3633): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 11:40:41.787: cannot register existing type 'GdkDisplayManager'

(dropbox:3633): GLib-CRITICAL **: 11:40:41.787: g_once_init_leave: assertion 'result != 0' failed

(dropbox:3633): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 11:40:41.787: g_object_new_with_properties: assertion 'G_TYPE_IS_OBJECT (object_type)' failed

Another thing to note, with regards to my internet line (so firewalls etc..) is that I have another Ubuntu PC connected and Dropbox works very well on that.

Walter

Thanks for keeping me posted on this @ldamico - how are you today?

Since your case is already being handled by a higher level technician, I would suggest that you waited for their update on this matter via email.

If there's anything else I can help with in the meantime, do let me know please. Thanks!

cfgobel

Hi,

I'm having exactly the same problem as @ldamico. But on a cleans 18.04 installation. It was working before but without the app indicator. But when I tried to fix the app indicator it stops to work and I came up with the same problem as @ldamico.

I guess things went bad when I installed the Dropbox extension from gnome-shell website. I'm not sure.

Walter

Sorry to hear about this @cfgobel - could you ensure you're meeting all of requirements as per this Help Center article:

https://www.dropbox.com/help/desktop-web/system-requirements

Note that if you’re computer is running Linux, and you want to run the Dropbox app, you need to use:

Operating system Ubuntu 14.04 or higher, Fedora 21 or higher
Glibc 2.19 or higher
The latest Dropbox app for Linux
- Download the latest app
A Dropbox folder on an ext4-formatted ****** drive or partition

[Note: ecryptfs is not supported, but Dropbox will continue to sync with supported file systems that are encrypted via full disk encryption (e.g. LUKS)]

In addition, if you’d like to get the full Dropbox desktop app, you need to use:

A computer capable of running the required operating system, and one of the following desktop environments:
- GNOME shell (may need the TopIcons extension to get the tray icon)
- Unity
- GNOME Classic
- XFCE with the corresponding Nautilus dependencies
These additional requirements, when applicable:
- GTK 2.24 or higher
- Glib 2.40 or higher
- Libappindicator 12.10 or higher
- Nautilus 3.10.1 or higher

If you're still having issues with this, you might need to perform an advanced re-install to attempt to fix this issue.

Keep me posted on your progress!

ldamico

Hi @cfgobel, unfortunately none of the responses by the Dropbox support helped. Neither did the technicians who worked on my ticket.

Eventually, deleting completely the installation and installing through command line helped me in managing the problem. I managed to install the command line version, which although it misses the GUI which is very useful for selective sync, is still better than having nothing. Some days ago, quite magically (in the sense that it happened completely out of the blue, without me doing anything except for writing a document) the icon appeared in the system tray and stuff seems to work!

MPaulosky

Hi,

I had the same issue. It was caused by setting

export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gnome

in ~/.profile. When I moved it to ~/.bashrc and rebooted Dropbox started normally and now I have full GUI support with trayicon.

I'm using Ubuntu 18.10 and this setting is related to QGnomePlatform:
https://github.com/FedoraQt/QGnomePlatform

Hope that helps!

cfgobel

In the end, I completely reinstall my ubuntu. I didn't see @MPauloky answer before.

Thanks anyway, guys.