strange dropbox behavior on ubuntu

Question

I have dropbox installed trough the ubuntu software center and it was working fine until few days ago.

Now it is having a very strange behaviour.

1) Often I receive a message from a dropbox process for my root password

2) It seems like if I have 2 dropbox version only one of them is running

donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ dropbox status
Dropbox isn't running!
donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ sudo dropbox status
[sudo] password for donbeo: 
Up to date
donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ 

3) Some times the files in dropbox are marked with the only read option.

4) The synchronization seems not perfect and I end up having a lot of conflict copies. This may be due to the fact that sometimes it does not start at the system startup. (Not really sure about this)

How can I solve all this?

EDIT:

I can not run dropbox without sudo:

donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ sudo killall dropbox 
[sudo] password for donbeo: 
donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ sudo dropbox status
Dropbox isn't running!
donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ dropbox start
Starting Dropbox...Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "dropbox/client/main.py", line 37, in <module>
  File "dropbox/client/aggregation.py", line 17, in <module>
  File "dropbox/sqlite3_helpers.py", line 21, in <module>
  File "dropbox/fatal_db_exception.py", line 1, in <module>
  File "arch/__init__.py", line 28, in <module>
  File "arch/linux/util.py", line 52, in <module>
  File "dropbox/url_info.py", line 19, in <module>
  File "dropbox/i18n.py", line 31, in <module>
  File "babel/__init__.py", line 33, in <module>
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 3032, in <module>
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 933, in subscribe
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 3032, in <lambda>
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2573, in activate
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2667, in insert_on
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2697, in check_version_conflict
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 2566, in _get_metadata
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1589, in get_metadata_lines
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1581, in get_metadata
  File "pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1692, in _get
IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/var/lib/dropbox/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.6.7/futures-2.1.3-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/top_level.txt'

EDIT 2: Trying to start dropbox after changing the folder permission:

donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ sudo chown donbeo /var/lib/dropbox/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.6.7/futures-2.1.3-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/top_level.txt
[sudo] password for donbeo: 
donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ 
donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ sudo dropbox status
Dropbox isn't running!
donbeo@donbeo-HP-EliteBook-Folio-9470m:~$ dropbox start
Starting Dropbox...



The Dropbox daemon is not installed!
Run "dropbox start -i" to install the daemon

Should I do dropbox start -i even if dropbox is already installed?

Answer 1

I would start by checking the permissions on ~/.dropbox and ~/Dropbox. Makes sure they are owned by you and you can read and write to them.

After that, re-install dropbox.

Finally, contact their support. Dropbox is closed source and commercial so we donit really have a log to work with to help you out. I would suspect a permissions problem though.

Answer 2

yes, it looks like you are running dropbox as root (!). If you run dropbox as root, security concerns aside, your files get owned by root (i.e. you can't open them as normal user). You need to kill dropbox sudo killall dropbox and restart as normal user. I don't think you'll have to reinstall dropbox.

Answer 3

you should change permissions rather than run as root: sudo chown [yourUsername]: /var/lib/dropbox/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.6.7/futures-2.1.3-py2.7.egg/EGG-INFO/top_level.txt

Answer 4

Even after purging, I could not get it to work. So I manually erased all hidden Dropbox folders in home and reinstalled it by downloading the .deb packange from the website.