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Pummelchen's avatar
Pummelchen
Helpful | Level 6
6 years ago
Solved

Dropbox GUI gone after Debian 10 Buster Upgrade

Hello, I used to run Debian 9.x with Kernel 5.1.x with GNOME desktop and Dropbox GUI installed from the Dropbox website (deb file). Usually in the bottom left corner there was a little box to find...
desktop
Linux
Setting up the apps
  • Pummelchen's avatar
    Pummelchen
    6 years ago

    Solution found:

    Disable GNOME Extension TopIcons Plus and instead install and enable gnome-shell-extension-appindicator, reboot, done.

    https://github.com/ubuntu/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator

     

    Seems that TopIcons Plus is not working in Debian 10 due to the newer GNOME version.

     

    Thanks to everyone with ideas and suggestions ! :innocent:

Pummelchen's avatar
Pummelchen
Helpful | Level 6
6 years ago

Hello Walter,

topicons seems to be incompatible with Buster. So I tried topicons plus and got the Dropbox icon back:

apt install firefox-esr
Start Firefox
Goto GNOME Extension website
Install GNOME Browser Extension
Install & Enable GNOME Extension TopIcons Plus
Remove previous Dropbox installation
Reboot
apt install dropbox

Dropbox Icon will apprear on the top bar but doesnt respond to any clicks. Left click, right click or house hover over the icon lead to no actions, no popup windows or anything. Just nothing happens.


Debian 10 uses Wayland instead of X which seems to cause all sorts of trouble.

I'm not sure if the issue is from me upgrading from Debian 9 to 10, but I will replicate this later tonight.

 

  • Здравко's avatar
    Здравко
    Legendary | Level 20
    6 years ago

    Hi Pummelchen,

    I will share some my experiences, may be similar to Yours. Sometime ago, every try to open Dropbox icon context menu for first time after service start, result in partially visible menu or entirely invisible. In addition it was impossible to close it using simple click on empty place or something like. It was need opening new window or some other big change in the desktop environment, so the 'dummy' menu to disappear. After that Dropbox menu appear as usual. It was happening only for Dropbox menu. For latest releases seems that's gone. I don't know which one is Your version, but You can still check for that - just to be sure. For example, after first try to open context menu, open and close one more console window for example and after that try the menu again.

    Seems You are using virtual installation. So, I will advise You - use mapping of host's Dropbox folder as a virtual drive in the virtual machine. In such a way You will keep lower Your network traffic and more 'natural' and fast transfer between the host and the virtual machine.:wink:

    Good luck!

  • Pummelchen's avatar
    Pummelchen
    Helpful | Level 6
    6 years ago

    Seems to be a more serious issue:

    I made a fresh new clean installtion of Debian 10 in VMware using these steps

    • boot from debian-10.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso
    • in the "Software Selection" page, unselect everything (nothing ticked)
    • finished setup and login as su
    • Install GNOME with: apt install gnome-core
    • boot into to GNOME desktop
    • Download latest Dropbox deb file, install, and confirm the Dropbox website authorization
    • Start Dropbox

    Same issue now, you can see Dropbox running and beeing very busy, but no icon is visible anywhere.

     

    I will test one more thing, by ticking GNOME as the Desktop choice in "Software Selection". So I will reinstall on a clean formatted disk and report back.

    • Здравко's avatar
      Здравко
      Legendary | Level 20
      6 years ago

      Opp... Hmm... Pummelchen,

      One note here. The Dropbox debian package is little bit buggy :dizzy_face:. There are no any dependencies ceclared! So, You have to ensure that everything declared in system dependencies page is installed, the package manager can't ensure this (dependencies - missing)!

      Nonetheless, what about direct mapping? It's much more convenient (at least I think so). You wouldn't need to install anything.

      • Pummelchen's avatar
        Pummelchen
        Helpful | Level 6
        6 years ago

        Thx for your suggestions. Yes, compared to Windows it is a nightmare to get Dropbox working on Linux.

         

        Direct mapping doesnt work if you share the Dropbox folder over SMB/FTP in a LAN where thousands of files are moved per day. The mapping software (like Expandrive, NetDrive etc.) at some point will get messed up. The Dropbox client itself, can keep up with that quite well. Rsync may work but I really want the original Dropbox GUI to make things simple to manage.

    • Pummelchen's avatar
      Pummelchen
      Helpful | Level 6
      6 years ago

      Same issue with GNOME selected during setup:

       

       

      In Debian 9 there was no requirement to install dependencies, it just worked using the deb file.

      I manually installed the dependencies recommended above but it does not change anything (https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/system-requirements#linux)

       

      Walter, can you please escalate this to be checked on higher level ? Dropbox on Debian needs to work out of the box, supported or not.

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