Ubuntu upgrade kills Dropbox

I have been a user of Dropbox for about six months now and think that it is a great service. I have it installed and running on five systems, all of which run Ubuntu.

When Jaunty Jackelope was released a week ago, I decided to upgrade all of my Ubuntu boxes. While the upgrade went flawlessly on all five systems, Dropbox died. I went out and downloaded the latest version of Dropbox which has Ubuntu 9.04 listed. Reinstalling the package did not resolve the issue. So I started playing at the command line and realized that this is really easy to fix. Here is the fixed that I came up with:

Open up a terminal and type in dropbox status and you should see a message like Dropbox isn’t running!. If you try and run dropbox start you will get another error indicating that The Dropbox daemon is not installed! and the resolution which is to start with the -i option.

So the actual command to install the daemon is dropbox start -i. Once I ran that, the daemon and Nautilus extension launched and updated immediately.

Few people are aware of the command line use of dropbox. Play around with the utility and see what I mean. The dropbox filestatus command is pretty neat. Just run it from within your Dropbox folder.

–Himuraken

8 thoughts on “Ubuntu upgrade kills Dropbox”

  1. Thanks,
    Also I was trying to run “dropbox -i start”…
    now when I click ok on the Dropbox installation pop-up window, it hangs on forever…
    maybe because I use a proxy server?
    If yes, I can I solve this?

  2. Thanks for posting this. Saved me a lot of time and head scratching … much appreciated

  3. Thanks.
    I had to run the command twice to make it work.
    So if first time does not fix it try a second one (don’t know why).

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