Comment 41 for bug 1016559

Still an issue with a fully-up-to-date 12.04 Unity.

install nautilus-dropbox via the dropbox.com official PPA, but cancel when it says to start.

then install the actual DB binaries via the manual method from the website.

if you have multiple accounts, must do this for EACH "home" folder - installs to .dropbox-dist

most howto's talk about starting via the daemon directly (dropboxd) but I found as long as the nautilus-dropbox package completed OK "dropbox start" works just fine, but it is running the above daemon behind the scenes.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/126198/how-to-install-dropbox