Fix Dropbox install permission errors on headless Ubuntu 18.04

I setup an Ubuntu 18.04 cloud server on upcloud to run a website. This was mainly Wordpress but with a lot of custom table statistics. I needed to import some exported files from another Mac OS X server every day. So I set up a free Dropbox account on the Ubuntu server. I followed the guide here:

https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux

I came to the last step starting Dropbox when I got this error:

~ Couldn't start Dropbox.
This is usually because of a permissions error. Storing your home folder on a     network share can also cause an error.

There are a lot of answers to this but since this was a fresh install it was not related to changing users or moving dropbox location. And also not a permission issue!

I came across some other linux discussions that led me to check my locale setup. The solution was to set up this correctly. Checked my locale:

➜ locale
LANG=C
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES=fi_FI.UTF-8
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=

Now to generate the missing locale and reconfigure settings.

➜ sudo locale-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.

➜ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
Generating locales...
  en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.    

So now all I had to do was log out and in again and run:

➜ ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

I would recommend to remove completely the failed installation before trying again and follow the guide on Dropbox with the link I started with above.

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p.s. I want to give credit to this article that helped me fix my locale issues.