Forum Discussion

Ben L.'s avatar
Ben L.
New member | Level 1
12 years ago

Linux client hangs in futex() call during startup

The Dropbox Linux client is hanging during startup on my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 box. It has worked on this machine before, and unfortunately I don't know what changed now. I have tried wiping out my "~/.dropbox" and "~/.dropbox-dist" directories, and using a fresh download of the client, but the hang persists. The same problem appears using both the 3.0.3 stable build as well as the 3.1.261 experimental build.

Tracing with "strace" reveals that the hang is in a call to "futex(0x295b1e0, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 0, NULL)". Attaching a debugger to the hung process shows that we are down in some Python code. Most of the stack frames are either "PyEval_EvalCodeEx()" or "PyEval_EvalFrameEx()". The innermost stack frame is "sem_wait()", called from "PyThread_acquire_lock()".

I'm at a loss how to work around this or debug it further. Any suggestions as to how I can get my Dropbox client back up and running?

desktop
Setting up the apps

13 Replies

Replies have been turned off for this discussion
Show More
  • Sven U.1's avatar
    Sven U.1
    New member | Level 1
    11 years ago

    I had success after scanning for missing library dependencies of the Dropbox distribution. Basically you can run something like this:

    LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.8.8/ ldd ~/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.8.8/* 2>/dev/null|grep "not found"

    Change the distribution path to match yours. In my case, the shipped libQt5WebKit.so.5 and libQt5WebKitWidgets.so.5 libraries depended on libxslt.so.1, which is not included in the Dropbox distribution. After installing it on my Debian Jessie system (package "libxslt1.1"), everything was working right away.

    Dropbox distribution version: 3.8.8; Debian "dropbox" package (installer) version: 2015.02.12.

    I have requested that the Debian "dropbox" package on linux.dropbox.com/debian/ is changed to depend on the "libxslt1.1" package to fix that particular problem.

  • Andrew S.51's avatar
    Andrew S.51
    New member | Level 1
    11 years ago

    Sven, thanks for your hint; I have to say I do have libxslt1.1 installed, and the output of a similar command it empty on my system.

     

    [This thread is now closed by moderators due to inactivity. If you're experiencing a similar behavior, feel free to start a new discussion in the Ask a Question section here.]

About Apps and Installations

Have a question about a Dropbox app or installation? Reach out to the Dropbox Community and get solutions, help, and advice from members.

The Dropbox Community team is active from Monday to Friday. We try to respond to you as soon as we can, usually within 2 hours.

If you need more help you can view your support options (expected response time for an email or ticket is 24 hours), or contact us on X, Facebook or Instagram.

For more info on available support options for your Dropbox plan, see this article.

If you found the answer to your question in this Community thread, please 'like' the post to say thanks and to let us know it was useful!