Dropbox doesn’t start (Linux)

So a quick note regarding Dropbox running on ArchLinux with Nvidia drivers. Since I use KDE Plasma 5 that doesn’t show system tray icons of some applications that have not migrated to the new system tray protocol, I didn’t notice that after upgrading Dropbox it stopped working.

A quick investigation, I’ve found out that starting Dropbox from the command line did nothing. It started and stopped. Something is going on…

So I’ve used the strace command to see if I could catch something meaningful:

[pcortex@pcortex:~]$ cd .dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.10.8/
[pcortex@pcortex:dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.10.8]$ strace ./dropbox 2> stracedump.txt

And sure enough in the stracedump.txt I had the following error:

open("/usr/lib/dri/tls/swrast_dri.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
--- SIGSEGV {si_signo=SIGSEGV, si_code=SEGV_MAPERR, si_addr=0} ---
rt_sigaction(SIGSEGV, {0x7f09e1dea010, [SEGV], SA_RESTORER|SA_RESTART, 0x7f09e1a88d60}, NULL, 8) = 0
write(4, "Fatal Python error: ", 20)    = 20
write(4, "Segmentation fault", 18)      = 18
write(4, "\n\n", 2)                     = 2
write(4, "Traceback (most recent call firs"..., 36) = 36
write(4, "  File ", 7)                  = 7
write(4, "\"", 1)                       = 1
write(4, "d", 1)                        = 1

So the error is related to the Software Raster library, that I don’t have because I’m running Nvidia proprietary drivers.

The confirmation came with the following command:

[pcortex@pcortex:dropbox-lnx.x86_64-3.10.8]$ LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose ./dropbox
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib/dri/tls/swrast_dri.so
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: reverting to indirect rendering

The solution?
Quite simple, just remove (backup) the libGL.so.1 library that exists on the Dropbox directory.
After the removal, Dropbox starts just fine.