Hey, Nautilus! Stop Being Naughty to Gnome-Do!

So I’ve seen this annoying little bug since around Ubuntu 8.04.  It’s still going strong even in Ubuntu 11.10.  I get this picture that Gnome-Do and Nautilus are pointing at each other each with an incredulous look upon the face.  Let me explain this annoying if minor bug.

Normally with Gnome-Do you can strike <super>—<space> and then type something like “Documents” and Gnome-Do will rush out and open your Documents folder (capitalization not required but provided here for clarity).  However, if you run Gnome-Do at login (and why would you not) you may have noticed that if you type “Home” Nautilus will make the claim that it is opening your Home folder, but it will silently fail in the background.

You can remedy this by exiting Gnome-Do and restarting it manually.  If you start Gnome-Do manually this problem does not exist.

Like I said it’s minor yet annoying.

Well I came across some bug reports which concern this exact bug, and among those bug reports I found this little gem which gave me an actual solution instead of the restart Gnome-Do work-around.  Don’t get me wrong: work-arounds have their places; I’d just rather have a solution.

It’s pretty basic.  You have to edit one of the Nautilus configuration files.

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/nautilus-home.desktop

(Never use sudo to run a graphical application like GEdit; always use GKSudo. You will be prompted for your password in a dialog window.)

The change you need to make is to add two characters ( .—yes, space dot) to the end of one line in this file.

##
# Change this line:

Exec=nautilus --no-desktop

# To this:

Exec=nautilus --no-desktop .

##

Now if you logout and back in you will find that Gnome-Do will have no trouble opening your Home folder.

Why Nautilus and Gnome-Do haven’t been able to sort this out in at least three years is beyond me.

Share

2 thoughts on “Hey, Nautilus! Stop Being Naughty to Gnome-Do!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *