Dropbox does not install in F37

Problem

If I try to install dropbox from the offical dropbox website (Install - Dropbox), I get an error saying that there’s a depsolve issue getting the right version of libnautilus. Besides the rather unhelpful error message, I’m stuck not being able to use dropbox.

Cause

In my understanding, this issue is caused by the GTK-4 update to Nautilus (aka Files), and the solution is to update the dropbox-nautilus integration. I have no idea to which extend this will ever happen, and who is responsible (dropbox or Gnome).

Related Issues

None that I am aware of.

Workarounds

None that I am aware of. Perhaps it’s possible to install an old version of Nautilus?
Any pointers would be valuable.

Hi Soren, thanks for raising this. Dropbox is so popular that we can probably make this a Common Issue. Nautilus changed extension API in GNOME 43, but Dropbox haven’t updated their extension yet. There is a fix here, but the maintainers haven’t responded yet:
https://github.com/dropbox/nautilus-dropbox/pull/105

At the same time, RPMFusion, which contains dropbox and used to contain nautilus-dropbox as well, removed nautilus-dropbox because of those build failures and also a lack of maintainers:
6381 – nautilus-dropbox is FTBFS on F36 and F37

This means you can’t install the RPM provided directly by Dropbox, because they haven’t updated it yet to latest Nautilus. You can install dropbox from RPMFusion, but it won’t have Nautilus integration (overlay icons, right click menu items). The core service will work, though (and if you install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator, you’ll see an icon in the top right corner in GNOME).

I’ll update your description and make it an official entry.

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I found out I can’t move this topic back to Proposed Common Issues so I created a new topic instead here:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/official-dropbox-package-doesnt-install-in-fedora-37/69314

(You can mark this reply as a Solution to your request, which will help other people find it).

There’s no dropbox package yet.

Found this as an alternative: GitHub - samschott/maestral: Open-source Dropbox client for macOS and Linux

Sure there is, in RPMFusion. See Official Dropbox package doesn't install in Fedora 37 .


dnf ls dropbox

Last metadata expiration check: 3:10:59 ago on Wed 16 Nov 2022 10:56:49 AM EET.

Error: No matching Packages to list

 dnf repolist enabled
repo id                                                                                                   repo name
code                                                                                                      Visual Studio Code
fedora                                                                                                    Fedora 37 - x86_64
fedora-cisco-openh264                                                                                     Fedora 37 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64
fedora-modular                                                                                            Fedora Modular 37 - x86_64
google-chrome                                                                                             google-chrome
rpmfusion-free                                                                                            RPM Fusion for Fedora 37 - Free
rpmfusion-free-updates                                                                                    RPM Fusion for Fedora 37 - Free - Updates
rpmfusion-nonfree                                                                                         RPM Fusion for Fedora 37 - Nonfree
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates                                                                                 RPM Fusion for Fedora 37 - Nonfree - Updates
updates                                                                                                   Fedora 37 - x86_64 - Updates
updates-modular                                                                                           Fedora Modular 37 - x86_64 - Updates

Just dropbox, without nautilus, would work fine? (no status icons shown in nautilus)

I’m on KDE and use the nautilus-dropbox packages along with dolphin-plugins dropbox integration. Works fine. You just have to start the dropbox service once. with “dropbox start -i” and enable the dropbox integration in dolphin.

I use flatpak dropbox, works but missing indicator.

Hi @kparal , when I try to dnf install dropbox, it proposes me to install rpmfusion-nonfree-obsolete-packages. I’m new to Fedora and I’m a bit confused. This is a placeholder, isn’t it? Dropbox is actually not in this package.

@vcarel I have stumbled over this as well and decided against installing obsoleted packages from rpmfusion (I haven’t found any “dropbox” package on the rpmfusion search engine as well). I ended up downloading the headless Dropbox daemon from dropbox.com (directly below the nautilus package rpm that doesn’t work any more) and using that. It also provides an appindicator icon with settings. But I’d be interested to know what the official recommendation is on that as well.

I didn’t know how to install the deamon, so I used Flatpack instead.

Since Flatpack is already installed by default, I only had to add Flathub following the instructions here: https://flatpak.org/setup/Fedora

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

And then use Softwares to search & install dropbox. Without nautilus integration of course.

Thanks. Originally I thought only nautilus-dropbox package disappeared from RPMFusion and it worked well for me at that time, but currently it really seems that the whole dropbox disappeared from RPMFusion including the core dropbox package. That’s unfortunate. I updated the Common Issue with alternative options.

This issue has now been addressed by Dropbox and an official version for F37 is now available at Install - Dropbox
Note there is an occasional issue with caching, but a retry seems to fix it.

2 Likes

And it should show up in rpmfusion-nonfree eventually: 6505 – Review request: nautilus-dropbox - Dropbox extension for Nautilus

1 Like