Dropbox on Ubuntu: OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

In Linux Tags #ubuntu #dropbox #linux Published 1/4/2019

I had an issue recently with Dropbox for Linux where Dropbox stopped working on my Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS server. Attempting to manually start with dropbox start -i I received the following error message:

    x@x:~$ dropbox start -i
    Starting Dropbox...Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/usr/local/bin/dropbox", line 1607, in 
        ret = main(sys.argv)
      File "/usr/local/bin/dropbox", line 1596, in main
        result = commands[argv[i]](argv[i+1:])
      File "/usr/local/bin/dropbox", line 1467, in start
        if not start_dropbox():
      File "/usr/local/bin/dropbox", line 794, in start_dropbox
        stderr=sys.stderr, stdout=f, close_fds=True)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 394, in __init__
        errread, errwrite)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1047, in _execute_child
        raise child_exception
    OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

To fix the issue I installed dbus with apt-get. To install the package use the following command:

sudo apt-get install dbus dbus-x11

What is D-Bus?

According to the d-bus web-site: D-Bus is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another. In addition to interprocess communication, D-Bus helps coordinate process lifecycle; it makes it simple and reliable to code a "single instance" application or daemon, and to launch applications and daemons on demand when their services are needed. Dropbox apparantly relies on this package to coordinate communication between the processes it manages.

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