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On ubuntu 14.04 LTS, sometimes my computer fails to launch Nautilus. This always happens when I have been working on it for a while (maybe after suspending and waking it again?), never when I just turned it on. I suspect this is related to gvfs filesystems mounted regularly and then left alone for a while. nautilus -q and similar commands give 

Could not register the application: Timeout was reached

whereas sudo nautilus does launch it.

This sounds related, but I don't understand the solution.

Logging out and back in solves the problem.

I know that other people have had the same problem in the past. I do think this is a serious issue. I reinstalled ubuntu recently (for other reasons) and the problem is still there. Might be worth mentioning that I have nautilus-dropbox installed.

Martino
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  • Have you tried the nemo file manager yet? (it's a fork of nautilus which has a lot more features with less of the head-aches) – Fabby May 18 '15 at 21:14
  • No, I never tried it. I may, but still, I think this is a serious issue. – Martino May 19 '15 at 10:47
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    Could you try? I've been using nemo using these installation instructions and have never had any problems since. If you want to find out exactly what is wrong with Nautilus, we'll have to take this up in chat as finding the exact problem might take a while. For starters: does this happen in the guest session too? – Fabby May 19 '15 at 13:15
  • Do you use Samba? If not, you may try to remove it. – Smile4ever May 25 '15 at 07:39
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    @Fabby Based on further testing on my question here Using nemo would seem to be an effective workaround/answer why not write it up? – Elder Geek Apr 30 '17 at 16:56
  • Meh, upvoted your comments and your Q&A – Fabby May 07 '17 at 15:28
  • There's an open bug report about this. It happened to me after I ran a very memory-intensive task. Presumably, something Nautilus depends on had been pushed off to swap. After I freed up some memory, tried nautilus again, and waited a few minutes, Nautilus comes back. So it seems to be a poor design in the Gnome architecture. – Cerin Jun 18 '17 at 22:34
  • This just happened to me on 18.04, slightly different wording Failed to register: Timeout was reached, I also am running dropbox but was also running a memory intensive task, swap showed ~30MB usage (RAM is 32GB) – smcs Jun 25 '19 at 08:40

5 Answers5

13

I had the same problem this morning! For no apparent reason.

I manage to restart nautilus by

killall nautilus
nautilus -q
nautilus

I'm trying to figure out what caused the mysterious failure.

Andrea Borga
  • 1,050
6

Yes, it is problably gvfs related.

The problem is this bug: gvfs should unmount remote mounts on network disconnect

Running this should allow you to use nautilus again.

gvfs-mount -s sftp & gvfs-mount -s smb & gvfs-mount -s ftp

Can take a few seconds to work

You can run it automatically. You have to write a script and save it as:

/etc/pm/sleep.d/20-gvfs

#!/bin/bash

case "$1" in
suspend)
    # executed on suspend
    gvfs-mount -s sftp & gvfs-mount -s smb & gvfs-mount -s ftp
    ;;
resume) 
    # executed on resume
*)
    ;;
esac

and 

sudo chmod +x /etc/pm/sleep.d/20-gvfs
Biblioclasta
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  • 4
  • 12
3

killall nautilus didn't work for me.

I ran :

ps aux |grep nautilus

To list all the process containing nautilus

And I stopped them by using the following command:

kill -9 <PID>
callmemath
  • 131
1

killall nautilus didn't work for me.

It was rabbitvcs for me. I kill it by using ps aux|grep rabbit and then kill -9 <pid>

It was the rabbitvcs service that stuck the nautilus from time to time.

Carl Cheung
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0

You just need to run the following commands

  1. killall nautilus
  2. Open a new terminal and run nautilus
gumisirizab1
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