Dropbox on Lucid: Missing GUI? Fix it now!

Dropbox is great and their support is phenomenal. Recently I have been having issues after upgrading to Lucid Lynx. It’s been a large bother on me because I use Dropbox a ton in my personal use. On my development server, I’m running Ubuntu 10.04 64 Desktop version, and I rely on Dropbox to keep my files in sync, including my programs that I write. However, after upgrading, I noticed that Dropbox was ‘missing’. It no longer appeared in the notification applet in the menu system. It was still in the Menu, but when I clicked it ‘nothing’ occurred! Well I solved the issue, with a little help from the Dropbox forums.

First, I noticed that when I accessed by System Monitor application (Menu->System->Administration->System Monitor), Dropbox was running, and in fact it was running very hard (heating up my machine in the process). Yet, nothing was visibly happening; no gui, no sync. Killing the process was the next step, and then running Dropbox again from the menu resulted in the same scenario; nothing visually occurring.

I tried uninstalling, reinstalling via the ‘apt’ commands. Did not help.

I tried uninstalling forcing a complete removal and reinstalling after adding back in the sources.list commands via ‘apt’. Did not help.

For awhile I considered that the issue was Lucid Lynx, so I sat on it for a week. After about 4 or 5 updates to the OS, I tried all of the previous steps, still nothing helped.

Finally a Solution!

I searched Google, and came across a very similar situation, occurring months ago on Suse Linux (http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=19094&replies=24#post-120769).

In this was the key, to do this just follow these steps.

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# Open your terminal.
cd ~
rm -rf .dropbox* Dropbox
wget  http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86-0.7.110.tar.gz
tar xzf dropbox-lnx.x86-0.7.110.tar.gz
.dropbox-dist/dropbox

Step by Step:

1. cd ~ : Navigate to your home directory

2. rm -rf .dropbox* Dropbox : Delete all folders starting with .dropbox and also remove the Dropbox folder (Warning, your Dropbox folder may have changes that will be deleted! Rename or make a backup first in this case.)

3. wget http.... : Download the newest stable version of Dropbox (this is a newer version than what is in the repository!)

4. tar xzf ... : Unzip/Unpack the downloaded file

5. Run Dropbox!

At this point you should find that the Dropbox opens up the installation information.

Follow the Dropbox instructions, and when finished, you will have the Dropbox notification icon in the notification applet in the menu. Right click on that applet, click on stop Dropbox. Close your terminal, and then navigate to the Dropbox menu item to start it up again. That’s all, it should work great now like it does for me!