HOWTO: Replace Nautilus with PCMan (4 Steps, No Fuss).

[tad1073]

bump...

[gsiliceo]

Sorry, i made a mistake in one of the commands, you have to do this.
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/pcmanfm /usr/bin/nautilus
I forgot the sudo part and its important =P
Tell me how it goes, and recheck the steps please you might have forgotten something.

[BIGtrouble77]

Couple of things to note...
The bad:
- PCMan does not support mime types nearly as well as nautilus, so no image or video previews.
- PCMan had weird behavior when launching from the Places location in the Gnome panel. Loading new instances opened under my current window. May be an issue with compiz fusion.
- Desktop mode is very under developed. Basically only works as an ordered folder.
- Could not connect to network through PCMan so it basically makes your network option in Places broken.

The Good:
- Has tabs support!!!!
- Looks almost exactly like Nautilus.
- Has tabs support!!!!

In the end I REALLY like PCMan, but it really makes me appreciate how good Nautilus is. I have no speed improvements on my Macbook, but the Tabs feature makes it worth having alone. Still needs more development, but very promising. This is a GREAT file manager for xfce, far better than thunar. I highly recommend just installing pcman and not having it take over nautilus... If you want light weight then use xfce with pcman.

Thanks for the howto.

-bt

[gsiliceo]

In the latest version it does support image previews but not video.

Yeah its a focus problem, changes with metacity recently have made a number of apps fail like this.

The next unstable version does a better job in the desktop, it looks much much better.

I miss network support too, but i use a stand alone samba browser(in the repositories).

I like it because its so fast, i dual boot and the file explorer in windows is super fast(when my windows is virus free) and i missed that in ubuntu, now i have it

[quina]

gsiliceo you make a small mistake:

sudo cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop.backup
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop /usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop

should be:

sudo cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop.backup
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop /usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop.backup

Luckily, I've made backups using commands from SilverWave's post, so have no problems, when returning to nautlius.
A few things, which annoing me most, are:
-no posibility to arrange icons(they are organised automaticaly, from left to right, top to bottom etc)
-problems with HAL(?!)(my phone card was mounted as read only:/)
-doesn't support drag&drop(beetwen aplications, eg. Totem)
-can't using RBM(right mouse button, is this correct form?), elsewhere than on icons...
But, i've been realy suprised how fast is PCManFM!!!
If someone would like to return to nautilus from PCManFM, should do(in terminal of course:

sudo cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop.backup /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop
sudo cp /usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop.backup /usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop
sudo cp /usr/share/gnome/default.session.backup /usr/share/gnome/default.session
sudo cp /usr/bin/nautilus.backup /usr/bin/nautilus

Then alt+ctrl+backspace
Hope, it will be helpful for some newbie

[gsiliceo]

Thanks man for the errata, i fixed it, and about those things you mention, i hate the lack of drag and drop support to copy/move files.

[newb1e]

I followed the instructions of the second post, everything is fine.
But the weird thing is, I can't see the nautilus.desktop and nautilus-folder-handler.desktop in the /usr/share/applications folder (I can see the backup file).
I can see and open them with gedit in the terminal.
When I try to rename nautilus.desktop.backup to nautilus.desktop, I got the error the file already existed, so pcman knows the .desktop files are there


And when I use the shortcut "Super L", I got the error "Couldn't execute command: nautilus", so where can I change it

[gsiliceo]

Those files a probably hidden, click view hidden files in pcman. About the second problem i don't know where to change that.
Is it the default shortcut to open nautilis un gutsy?

[subru77]

I followed the steps mentioned and had 2 problems.

1) Places > Computer throws "File does not exist" error
2) The deskop wallpaper is missing and does appear when I run PCmanfm. So should I add PCmanfm to the startup ? Is there any other way?

Thanks

[gsiliceo]

Yes, you need to add it to start up, but don't worry all it will do is load your desktop. And yes, the computer/network places links are broken, but the developer might fix them soon, it's being a while since he released a new version after releasing many in a row. I guess he will come back soon with fixes.
The official webpage here.
http://pcmanfm.sourceforge.net/
You might want to help filing a bug here
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?grou...56&atid=801864