Nautilus acting up

[rikona]

Hello Colin,

Friday, December 9, 2016, 1:05:47 AM, Colin wrote:

> On 9 December 2016 at 05:02, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
>> ...
>> Nautilus was "disappearing" when minimized, which is what I mentioned
>> in my original email.

> The nautilus window is closing instead of minimising.

>> I could not find a way to restore Nautilus after it was minimized.

> That's because the window is closed.

>> When minimized, Nautilus does not show up as one of the icons that
>> appear when you use alt tab.

> That's because the window is closed

It would seem to be that way, but why?

>> ...
>> Nemo is rather nice, and I like it, but it is not proving to be
>> particularly stable on my system, possibly because of that bug. It is
>> listed as a low priority "recoverable bug", but it crashes all 5-7
>> running instances of Nemo, each with perhaps 3 to 5 tabs. That's an
>> awful lot of work to lose, and Nemo is not turning out to be as useful
>> as I thought it would be. It would be nice if that could be fixed -
>> any ideas?

> So are you looking for fixes to Nautilus or Nemo?

Both have problems at this point, so fixing either or both is good.

> Perhaps the problems are related as I gather they are based on the
> same orginal code.

Interesting idea but the problems are different. Nemo is almost OK,
overall better than the CURRENT Nautilus, but rather unreliable re
complete wipe out crashes.

> Note that in Nemo you may be looking for bug fixes, which is
> something you can do little about,

Agreed, unfortunately.

> whereas for Nautilus it is something specific to your machine that
> is causing the problem, which you can (in principle) do everything
> about.

I am hoping so...

> If you are still looking for fixes to the Nautilus issues then first
> try my suggestion of running from a live image of 16.04 just to
> check that you do not see any issues there.

Your suggestion was a very good one. It took a few days to get to a
reasonable stopping point re several ongoing projects. I saved some
work and tried the DVD. It seems to work OK, as I remember it was in
the original installation. The icon works as expected, multiple icons
are there with alt tab and can be restored, and some copy/pastes of a
file name in Nautilus work. It does not paste into terminal, though,
but I'm not sure it ever did that. I could not install stuff when
running the DVD, so didn't test it with any KDE stuff. The KDE stuff
DOES paste into terminal, unlike Nautilus.

> Then copy/paste here the result of apt-cache policy nautilus

nautilus:
  Installed: 1:3.18.4.is.3.14.3-0ubuntu5
  Candidate: 1:3.18.4.is.3.14.3-0ubuntu5
  Version table:
 *** 1:3.18.4.is.3.14.3-0ubuntu5 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main amd64 
Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1:3.18.4.is.3.14.3-0ubuntu4 500
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
N: Ignoring file '20auto-upgrades.ucf-dist' in directory '/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/' 
as it has an invalid filename extension

> Then I think it is important that we understand the history of the
> system further.
> Is it a new install of 16.04 or an upgrade?

Original install#1 - installed 16.04 Ubuntu, then installed KDE
desktop, a disaster.

Original install#2: Formatted both disks, did a from-DVD 16.04
install, updated the software, copied the data from 12.04 home, and
IIRC things worked reasonably well as I tested the box for a week or
so. In 12.04 I installed LOTS of pgms, KDE and otherwise, and
everything ran together quite well. So, installed some KDE and other
stuff, expecting it would, again, work together well. Not so good this
time, had problems, installed some alternate FMs, which had their own
problems.

> If an upgrade did the system show any similar odd behaviours before upgrade?
> When did the problems first appear?  Was it after you did something
> such as installing an app or changing some system config for example?

The problems seemed to be after other pgms were installed. All these
were not installed at the same time, but as I needed a capability that
some pgm would provide. So, in a sense, problems got more numerous
over time. I do updates frequently but not automatically, not sure how
these contributed to the problem. Nvidia software was installed along
the way too, but not initially.

Thanks much for your help. 

-- 

 rikona