Ubuntu 23.10 - No menu

Hi there beaniew - sorry to hear about this.

Have you ensured that your device meets the minimum requirements as outlined here? If this persists after rebooting your computer, could you reinstall the app and let us know how it goes?

Thanks!

Hi Walter,

I've reinstalled and restarted as suggested, here's the error logs that comes up when running "dropbox start" :

in /home/ben/programs/ 
› dropbox start
Starting Dropbox...dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/cryptography.hazmat.bindings._openssl.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/cryptography.hazmat.bindings._padding.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/apex._apex.abi3.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/psutil._psutil_linux.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/psutil._psutil_posix.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/tornado.speedups.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/wrapt._wrappers.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/PyQt5.QtCore.so'
Dropbox isn't running!
Done!
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/PyQt5.sip.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/PyQt5.QtGui.so'
dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/PyQt5.QtWidgets.so'

in /home/ben/programs/ 
› dropbox: load fq extension '/home/ben/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-195.4.4995/PyQt5.QtDBus.so'

(dropbox:36124): LIBDBUSMENU-GLIB-WARNING **: 17:26:07.079: About to Show called on an item wihtout submenus.  We're ignoring it.

The software seems to work, just not the App indicator in Ubuntu 23.10.

Possibly a dependency issue here perhaps??

Seems related to this issue here -> https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/2788

beaniew That's very strange — without that extension, you shouldn't even have had an icon there. That extension is the thing that provides the system tray itself, for Dropbox to show up in.

I do have that extension installed, on Fedora 40, and the situation is the same as you originally reported — nothing happens when I click the icon. When I deactivate the extension, the Dropbox icon disappears entirely, as I'd expect.

HUH! But, turns out RESTARTING the extension (just switching it off and on again) did actually make Dropbox's menu accessible!

Thanks all, this does indeed work -- but it's not a satisfactory solution because it looks like I'll have to stop and restart the extension on every boot. That may be trivial for Linux mavens but I am not one of them.

No, I agree, and I've already reported the issue to the extension maintainers.

ubuntu/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator #529: Dropbox icon won't accept clicks until appindicator extension is restarted

No response yet.

---

beaniew wrote:

Seems related to this issue here -> https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/2788

---

I don't think this is actually related to that issue, because it just affects the contents of the menu, not whether it works at all.

(In other words, even after restarting the AppIndicator extension, the Dropbox menu on my system always shows "Connecting..." and is missing several additional menu items that it used to contain. That's libdbusmenu-glib4 #2788. But the fact that it doesn't come up AT ALL until the AppIndicator extension is restarted is something new/different.)

One thing that might help, notredruide, is to make sure dropbox  is started before the extension. That's how I have it set up on my system, and as a result I don't have to restart the extension every boot, only after I restart dropbox manually.

On my system I've done that by setting up a systemd service to start the daemon, in place of $HOME/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop. That's a bit technical, but I'll provide the service file definition for anyone interested.

But if you don't want to go that route, by default $HOME/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop contains an autostart delay:

X-GNOME-Autostart-Delay=10

 Deleting that line might help it start up before the extension, in which case you wouldn't need to restart anything.

For anyone who wants to have their systemd user session manage the daemon, instead of relying on autostart, you can delete the autostart file and create a dropbox.service file instead. My service definition, with dropbox installed into /usr/bin/ from the Dropbox RPM repository, is:

[Unit]
Description=Dropbox Network Storage Daemon
After=network-online.target graphical-session.target gnome-shell.service

[Service]
Type=forking
PIDFile=%h/.dropbox/dropbox.pid
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dropbox start -i
ExecStop=/usr/bin/dropbox stop
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target