nautilus root problem

[obis666]

Hi, I installed the latest version of Ubuntu the day it was released and I am having nautilus problems (I think). I ran 2 instances of this command at once (2 terminals):
>sudo nautilus

I did this to simplify copying some sound files from my download dir to my /usr/share/sounds/ dir. I have never had a problem doing this in the past but in this latest version it messes up Gnome. Everything ran fine until I rebooted and then it just hangs trying to load gnome. I checked the permissions of the files I moved. The files are owned by root and have the proper permissions. I even removed the files I placed in the /usr/share/sounds dir. The exact same problem has happened on 2 different machines now (the second machine I didnt move any files I just opened >sudo nautilus and browsed around and then x'ed out.) I can run XFCE on the second machine but I have not tried on the original. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I have finals this week and I really don't have much time to figure this out (or reinstall for that matter). Thanks in advance.

[hermes0710]

If it's not such a big trouble, try removing the nautilus settings from your users directory. Else than that, try adding a new user and log in as the new user. Does this still happen?

[logos34]

try

gksudo nautilus

[obis666]

ok first thanks for the ideas. I created a new user with no problems I was able to start gnome with nothing abnormal happeneing. but looking at my old profile I have a directory with weird permissions listed (or rather nothing listed.) So I did a ls -al in my old dir and I got

-rw-r--r-- 1 obis666 obis666 249 2008-05-11 13:54 .gtk-bookmarks
d????????? ? ? ? ? ? .gvfs
-rw------- 1 obis666 obis666 3464 2008-05-11 13:56 .ICEauthority

yes the question marks are there. I didnt fill them in.

so I did a
>sudo bash
and then:
>chown -R obis666 .gvfs
and got:
>chown: cannot access `.gvfs': Permission denied

then I did a:
>chmod 700 .gvfs
and got:
>chmod: cannot access `.gvfs': Permission denied



any ideas?

[obis666]

ok, after logging out of the new profile has the same result. It just hangs on startup. this occurs over and over, create a new profile from failsafe term, reboot, then the profile no longer works. any help please?

[hermes0710]

It seems that logging in creates settings for a specific process which is not able to auto start again based on them. I suggest you firstly disable compiz and if that was not the problem go to System>Administration>Services and start playing with the services (disable one by one to see which one causes the problem)

[obis666]

I've already tried turning off compiz. This is not the problem. I also un-checked the various services from the admin menu. I dont think this is the problem because I ran ubuntu 8.04 for about 2 weeks with no problems at all until tried to
>sudo nautilus
and then I started having problems. I didnt make any changes to the system before the issues started other than running nautilus as root.

[hermes0710]

Try removing all settings from nautilus (it's a folder under home directory but i don't know which exactly, i am not home)

[obis666]

I tried this already, I moved everything in my home directory into a thumbdrive and restarted (leaving no config files at all). This allows me to start gnome just fine, however... When I reboot or logout then the problem reoccurs. Gnome just hangs indefinitely.

[Awalton]

Reasons like this are why I cannot profess enough:

Using Nautilus as Root is UNSUPPORTED, UNTESTED, AND DANGEROUS.
DO NOT RUN NAUTILUS AS ROOT, EVEN FOR "SIMPLE, HARMLESS TASKS".
(blinking red text would have been better...)

*ahem*. Now that we have that out of the way: what part of GNOME is locking up? Does everything else still work if you kill Nautilus (nautilus -q, killall nautilus, etc)? If the problem is persisting across users then it's probably a bit more serious...