Ubuntu 24.04 is stuck on "Starting..." after installing the app.

[alexjcrane]

Installed from the Dropbox site on Aug 14, 2024. The tray icon comes up but only reacts to a click after Lock-Unlock of the screen (weird, but not critical). However the status stuck on "Starting...", and no syncronisation is happening.

Itg appears to be new behavior, and I cannot think of what changed

[Megan]

Hey @alexjcrane, welcome to our Community! 

It'd be helpful to quit and relaunch the Dropbox app on your machine or even reboot the machine itself as well. 

Also, do you happen to be running any 3rd party apps like antivirus or firewalls, or VPN/proxy settings on your machine? If so, could you temporarily disable them and let me know how it goes?

Keep me posted! 

[alexjcrane]

Hi Megan, thank you.

I of course done all the rebooting/restarting before bothering you.
I haven't setup antivirus or firewall at this stage - I am setting up this Ubuntu box. AFAIK Ubuntu firewall is disabled by default

[Hannah]

Hi @alexjcrane, I hope it's okay for me to jump in here.

Can you please just check if your computer meets the minimum requirements for the Dropbox app to work correctly?

[fma1cr]

I think the thing is - Dropbox's context menu doesn't work anymore or maybe it's just removed. I synced Dropbox account with my Ubuntu laptop by signing with a browser and it seems working.

[fma1cr]

I think you're not considering that we're neither macOS or Windows users.

[perenial]

FWIW I am seeing the exact same behavior. It's a fresh ubuntu 24.04 install, and I installed the desktop app from the the dropbox provided .deb file.

On first launch, I was redirected to the browser to log in, and that worked, and it proceeded to sync files to my machine. However, now when I start up two things happen:

1) The context dropdown on the status bar icon is not accessible -- until after I lock and unlock the desktop.

2) Even after I do the lock/unlock and get the context dropdown, the status is stuck forever on "Starting...", and no files are sync'd.

Very repeatable. `dropbox stop` and then `dropbox start` does not resolve it. Is there a method to get any additional log information?

[perenial]

OK I found a fix to this: It seems that dropbox was hitting the inotify file watch limit, and increasing this resolved it.

To fix, edit /etc/sysctl.conf, to add this line:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=131072

Then reload the config with `sudo sysctl -p`.

Then restart dropbox.