Fixing Dropbox in Linux

Dropbox, being a massively insecure piece of software, and one that runs across multiple platforms, is full of bugs and has many issues that makes it a piece of garbage. One of the bugs I’ve encountered in Linux is a permission issue for the Dropbox folder. The error message is something like… “Couldn’t start Dropbox. This is usually because of a permissions error. Storing your home folder on a network share can also cause an error.”

There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to fix this issue, but there is a work around which sufficeth.

By running the terminal command…

sudo ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

and providing a super user password dropbox will run once. *see note below if you can’t launch it that way.

And so a permanent change to your menu for launching applications can let you use dropbox without much effort every time.

In the KDE desktop menu you can change the shortcut path to that and tell the program to run in a terminal and that will give you an opportunity to run the program from the menu. (Edit the KDE menu by right clicking on the K at the bottom of the screen then go to Edit Applications and Dropbox should be under Internet – Dropbox. Change the command to the phrase listed in bold above, then go to the advanced tab and click the run in terminal option on.

You’ll also want to disable the autolaunch for dropbox so once dropbox is running rightclick on the icon that appears at the box of the screen, go to preferences, go to the general tab, and then uncheck Start Dropbox on system startup.

That should do it. Garbage software makes our lives much harder. Can’t we go back to paper and typewriters?

*Note: If you have trouble running the dropbox software from the terminal at any point it could be that dropbox is currently running already, but not running correctly of course, because garbage right?, so in the terminal type killall dropbox and then try again.