Dropbox issue on ubuntu mate 15.10 and 16.04 beta

i tried logging into dropbox today and was met with this:

clicking it in the hopes of bringing the dropbox menu up resulted in this:

i have rebooted; closed and opened all panels; moved them about to the left, right, bottom and back to the top; used the mate tweak to reset the panel; restarting X, all to no avail.

htop reports the dropbox version as 3.14.2 i am also running compiz.

Are indicators enabled? (Can be checked in MATE Tweak)

This same icon appears for Telegram as well (15.10 and 16.04 Alpha 1), but only on indicator layouts.

i deleted, reinstalled and left it running while i went off and did something else. came back to find it had broken itself again, so i deleted it all (including the . folders) and reinstalled.

sat there and watched it for a bit only to see for myself the icon turning from the usual dropbox icon to the ones in the screenshots above. it appears to be happening after the dropbox client/daemon updates itself.

Fixed in 16.04 because we’ve finally got caja-dropbox in the repos.

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Is there a manual fix we can do for 15.10 in the mean time?

You could upgrade to MATE 1.12.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/wily-mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install caja-dropbox

I finally got round to upgrading to MATE 1.12, but it didn’t have the desired effect. The dropbox icon next to the clock still shows as a no entry sign as in the pictures above.

The upgrade did add the dropbox icons to the files in the dropbox folder.

The telegram icon also shows as a no entry sign.

I also have this problem starting from today. For whatever reason, after a system restart, Dropbox switched from the systray (which is still in my panel) to the notifications indicator; it doesn’t even seems to be tied to a system update. I tried to reinstall is properly (i.e. removing .dropbox and .dropbox-dist then doing a dropbox start -i) but it doesn’t change anything.

The icon is not a big deal, I assume that it’s just status icons missing from the theme (I know for sure that the indicator tries to use icons from the system theme while the tray version gets them only from ~/.dropbox-dist − the only thing that I’m not sure is if the indicator is supposed to check in .dropbox-dist when it doesn’t find the icons in the theme). The real problem is that the menu is non-functional, it doesn’t appear when clicking on the (missing) icon. Other indicators seem to work fine (sound volume, network, even Steam).

Anybody has a clue as to what happened and how to fix this behaviour? Using the indicator rather than the old systray version would be great if it worked but in the current case, I’d like to revert to the previous behavior.

EDIT: note that I’ve tried to update to Mate 1.12 through the PPA. In fact, I was already using it when the problem appeared. I purged it to get back to Mate 1.10 but no change.

EDIT 2: the icon not displaying doesn’t seem to be because of missing one in theme; rather the indicator not loading properly at all.

Got the same problem on my machine. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 with Mate 1.8.2.

Problem only noted today. No obvious updates to the system. Looked through a range of fora but been unable to find an answer.

ubuntu 15.10 same problem

I have noted that I have nautilus-dropbox and caja-dropbox on my system (Ubuntu 14.04 with Mate 1.8.2 Desktop). When I uninstall the nautilus-dropbox the icon disappears from the panel. Why? Shouldn’t the caja-dropbox be operational when I am using Mate? Is there a problem with integration of the caja-dropbox package so that when you are using the mate desktop it is the version being used or does the panel always refer back to the standard dropbox package?

If I remove nautilus-dropbox then I have no icon at all. The caja-dropbox package is not picked up. I even uninstalled both, installed caja-dropbox and it still did not work.

I don’t think it’s the same problem. IIRC, at some point, the nautilus-dropbox package in the Ubuntu (partner?) repo was in fact Dropbox. Or it was a dummy package that downloaded Dropbox, not sure. Or was it the opposite, i.e. the dropbox package from the repo partner that was a dummy for nautilus-dropbox? Well, I remember it was a mess. What is happening to you, I think, is that when removing nautilus-dropbox, you removed Dropbox altogether, thus the panel icon disappearing.

So, try the following:

  • remove nautilus-dropbox
  • check that caja-dropbox is still installed (not sure the version from 14.04 is functional, though)
  • grab the deb package for Ubuntu (32 or 64 bits depending on your installation) on dropbox.com and install it

The caja-dropbox package is not supposed to have anything to do with the icon in the panel or the Dropbox installation. It’s only integration for Caja, i.e. the part that add the emblems showing the sync status of the Dropbox folder in Caja.
The nautilus-dropbox package did the same thing for Nautilus until the Ubuntu devs did weird things with it (might be around Ubuntu 14.04).

Thanks Terzag but that did not work. Same behaviour as described in the original post.

You are probably right however that when installing nautilus-dropbox the icon disappears because dropbox is removed.

After trying your suggestion I reinstalled nautilus-dropbox and despite having just installed dropbox from the link you provided it decided to download it again. Considering my system worked fine up to a few days ago it seems someone has changed something and caused an unexpected error.

Do you have the indicators enabled in Mate panel (not sure they were there in Mate 1.8, I wasn’t using it at the time)? If so, do you have a faulty icon appearing in the panel (like the image in OP’s message)? if not, do you have the systray applet in your panel?

It’s weird that Dropbox is installing again, as it’s not really dependant of the package (it installs in the user directory, in .dropbox-dist), though it’s possible − and even probable − that the package post-install script forces the installation of Dropbox even if it’s already there.

My dropbox panel icon changed to question mark and dropbox no longer working. I am gonna reinstall UBUNTU MATE and gonna do it right this time. Had enough with so much errors and issues. I know most of them maybe not errors or can be easily solve but lack of Linux knowledge only gives me One option. Reinstall. Also when i boot it take much more time and displaying FSCK and some numbers on the screen. i think its something like windows scan Disk option.

Yep, fsck is the disc scanning/repairing tool. It’s supposed to be done automatically at boot every now and then (every 30 boots IIRC). If it happens each time you boot Mate, it might be an indication that your hard drive has bad sectors.

According to synaptic, dropbox is not a dependency for the nautilus-dropbox package BUT is listed as an installed file (/var/lib/dropbox).

Funny though, although I have dropbox operating in the background and nautilus-dropbox has also installed a version, synaptic says it is not installed.

I am going to remove everything again and install dropbox from synaptic to see what it does rather than the command line. I will post the results.

What a mess.

If you install the distro’s version dated 28/10/2015 it does not work at all with the nautilus-dropbox package. Trying to install the nautilus-dropbox package synaptic marks the installed dropbox for removal then complains there are broken packages.

Trying to install the caja-dropbox package synaptic installs correctly and appears operational (that is a menu option appears in caja allowing you to move files to your dropbox).

The indicator icon is broken as in the OP when dropbox is installed by itself and following the installation of caja-dropbox.

If you install the distro's version dated 28/10/2015 it does not work at all with the nautilus-dropbox package. Trying to install the nautilus-dropbox package synaptic marks the installed dropbox for removal then complains there are broken packages.

Yep, that's what I was talking about earlier: nautilus-dropbox is basically dropbox, so it conflicts with the official dropbox package. Don't install nautilus-dropbox, it's broken and completely useless (even in Unity or Gnome, as the official Dropbox packages includes the Nautilus extension anyway). Keep the 28/10/2015 version even if it's currently broken in Mate, as other packages won't work anyway. Reverting to an older Dropbox version might work but the indicator would likely be broken again as soon as it updates.

Trying to install the caja-dropbox package synaptic installs correctly and appears operational (that is a menu option appears in caja allowing you to move files to your dropbox).

That's normal, as it doesn't include Dropbox, it's only a lib that manages the emblems on the Dropbox folder in Caja (and the options in the context menu). It's the equivalent of the Nautilus extension, which is the only one officially supported by the Dropbox developers (thus the need to have a separate package for other file managers like Caja, Thunar and such).

I've also been frustrated by this issue recently, but today I found a solution which works for me at least on UM 15.10.

~$ dropbox stop && dbus-launch dropbox start

This is from Askubuntu here btw (bottom comment).

My icon is back and the context menu too, albeit in white...

Hope this is useful.

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