After installing Dropbox in Xubuntu 14.04/16.04, you may discover that the panel indicator icon for Dropbox does not load properly. You’ll know you have this problem if a red circle with a red slash through it appears in place of the Dropbox icon in the indicator panel. The following three steps ensure proper functioning—a full repair in under three minutes!
1. Create a local user’s copy of the Dropbox desktop file (if it does not already exist).
Determine whether a local user copy of the Dropbox desktop file already exists:
ls ~/.local/share/applications/dropbox.desktop
If no such file exists, then copy the global user copy to the local user’s folder:
cp /usr/share/applications/dropbox.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
2. Edit the local user’s copy of the Dropbox desktop file.
It is better to edit the local copy (~/.local/share/...) than the global copy (/usr/share/...), since future upgrades to Dropbox might modify the global copy, whereas the local copy will remain in the customized form that you desire.
Open the local user’s file with your favorite text editor (e.g., Nano):
nano ~/.local/share/applications/dropbox.desktop
Replace this line ...
Exec=dropbox start -i
... with these two lines (i.e., insert a hash tag to de-activate the original line and then add a second line):
#Exec=dropbox start -i
Exec=env DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="" dropbox start -
Save the file and exit the text editor.
3. Adjust the session startup configuration to ensure that Dropbox reloads properly each time the user logs in.
Copy the modified local user’s desktop file into the user’s autostart folder (which also effectively replaces any existing autostart desktop file for Dropbox with the new configuration from Step 2):
cp ~/.local/share/applications/dropbox.desktop ~/.config/autostart/dropbox.desktop
Log out and log back in for the changes to take effect.
Dr. Ryan MacPherson holds a PhD in history and philosophy of science from the University of Notre Dame. After serving for twenty years as a professor at Bethany Lutheran College, he served as the founding academic dean of Luther Classical College for three years. He is author of Rediscovering the American Republic, a two-volume anthology of primary sources in American history, as well as several other books on topics ranging from theology to politics to bioethics. Dr. MacPherson has testified in court in defense of a homeschool father and for the protection of traditional American civics curricula, contributed to legal briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in defense of marriage and the rule of law, appeared regularly on a variety of radio shows, and taught seminars for pastors and educators in Canada, Denmark, and Ecuador. The MacPherson homeschool family offers online enrichment courses through Lifelong Lyceum.
