Nautilus seems to be broken in my installation of Fedora 14. I try to launch it, and it appears in the task bar momentarily and then disappears. Anyone have any suggestions?
[Update a couple minutes later]
I’ve already uninstalled/reinstalled, in case anyone was going to suggest that.
[Update a while later]
Don’t know why, but now it’s working. Go figure.
Are you launching from the command line? If not, try that and see if there are any messages. Shutting down the X Session completely and restarting all of the ‘desktop’ services may or may not help as well.
What desktop are you using? (I’m an Ubuntu user, so I don’t know the default for Fedora) KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc?
Another note: In Ubuntu, the nautilus task has an open file handle to .xsession-errors in my home directory; looking at the end of that file (tail -f in another window) may also be helpful.
In dire straits, we may end up having you run it under ‘strace’ and send me the log file.
Also, make sure there isn’t already another copy running (say, the desktop) that’s the old version, as that may interfere.
Shutting down the X Session completely and restarting all of the ‘desktop’ services may or may not help as well.
I actually completely rebooted (had to for other reasons, due to updates) and it didn’t help.
If I just type “nautilus” at the command line, it just returns the prompt. Nothing else happens. It clearly recognizes it as a command, but doesn’t do anything.
(Re ‘reboot’ one learns not to assume anything, but OK.)
In a fresh session, if you do a ‘ps -u yourusername’ in a command window, do any of the lines already have ‘nautilus’ in them (i.e., is a copy already running to present your desktop?)
In either case, clear out the .xsession-errors file in your home directory, and run it again, then check for new errors there.
Hmmmm…
I just tried it again, and now it’s working. Now sure what I did.
There’s a common thread to all your problems with Linux as a desktop system.
And that’s that you’re using Linux as a desktop system, rather than as a pure server platform.
Long experience with it has convinced me that’s a mistake.
Sigivald, I will admit that Linux-based desktop software does tend towards the fragile. It’s no worse than point-zero releases of Windows, generally. Plus, Linux-the-kernel takes a lot of grief for the applications that the distributions bundle with it, just like Windows NT-based OS’s take grief for crashes caused by bad drivers written by the hardware folks.
Rand, glad to see it’s working. Hope it stays that way. Did you do a second restart or log-out/log-in? Or did it just ‘heal’ itself.
What do you propose that I use as a desktop system? I’m not going back to M$, and I’m not going to buy a Mac.
Glenn, it seems to have healed itself. The other weird thing was that yesterday, I couldn’t ls my home directory, though it worked fine as route. Don’t know if it was related. Anyway, all seems to be well now.
Well, not being able to read your own home directory will crash out a *lot* of software. All those semi-hidden ‘dot-files’ perform the same kind of configuration storage as the Windows registry; if a program can’t even read its setup, it tends to fall over.
“Can’t ls home directory” is really a new one on me.
“Can’t ls home directory” is scary; that’s often an indication of filesystem corruption. I guess it could also be some kind of kernel issue, or maybe problems with name services (but I think you’re using local /etc/hosts and passwd files rather than NIS or similar?).
I’m not sure that it couldn’t read it. All I know is that when I ‘ls’d, it went off to never-never land. Didn’t even return to prompt, and I couldn’t crtl-C out of it. Had to close the terminal to end the process.
Probably the same thing was happening to Nautilus. If it happens again, just out of curiosity, you might see what the ls is hanging on by logging all his system calls: “strace ls”.