Stuck on "upgrading dropbox"

[Martin T.1]

As of today Dropbox is permanently stuck on "upgrading Dropbox". I'm running Dropbox in Linux. I've found references to such error messages a good while back by Googling, but no simple fix.

[danielbradley]

As an update, the latest version of Dropbox for Linux (94.4.384) seems to require a whole bunch of libraries that seem UI related, which is odd for a headless clients. These can be installed using the following (on APT based systems):

apt install libglapi-mesa libxdamage-dev libxcb-glx0 libxcb-dri2-0 libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-present-dev libxshmfence-dev libxxf86vm-dev

You may also need libatomic:

apt install libatomic1

Then do:

./dropbox.py stop

./dropbox.py update

Check the output, if there are any complaints about missing libraries, do a Google search similar to "<your linux distro> how to install <library name>" 

Regards,

Daniel.

[davewiner]

I'm having this problem now. And none of the solutions I've tried, including the ones outlined here, have worked. 

All my Linux servers that run Dropbox are now trying to upgrade themselves and apparently failing. Nothing is syncing.

I'm getting a jumble of errors -- I have no idea what they mean -- and I don't want to know. Here's what it looks like.

[Dinsdale]

I'm finding it difficult to read those log lines, but it looks as though you are missing "libglapi.so.0" and on my - OpenSuse Leap 15.1 - system that is being provided by the package "Mesa-libglapi0". There is a 32-bit and a 64-bit version, I only have the 64-bit version installed.

[danielbradley]

Davewiner: what Ubuntu version are you using? Also is it server (with UI) or desktop?

Daniel.

[davewiner]

Ubuntu 18.04.3 (LTS) x64 -- five of the servers are on Digital Ocean, one is on EC2/AWS.

They're all headless servers. 

[davewiner]

The listings are impossible to read. That's exactly how they appear on my screen.

I just use Dropbox, I don't want to know anything about its internals. It's kind of appalling that they do this, auto-upgrade, and that's broken? That's the one thing you can't break. You can see from a Google search that this has been going on for YEARS. 

Do any of you consider switching to something that's more stable? I know that I am. The last couple of years I've had a lot of problems with Dropbox. I've been using it since the beginning. 

[danielbradley]

Davewiner:

what output do you get when you do?:

sudo apt install libglapi-mesa

[davewiner]

I don't know what that is and why I need to update it.

It looks like an OS component??

I did a search, but there isn't much in the way of docs. 

[davewiner]

I went back and looked at the earlier message. I'll try it now. 

[davewiner]

It seemed to work, and then I did a "dropbox stop" and a "dropbox start" and it did it cleanly, no Upgrading Dropbox message on status. 

Then it says "up to date" for status. But something's still not right, I'm investigating. 

Thanks for the tip that seemed to get me out of the limbo I was in.