Running Nautilus Outside Of Gnome

A little while back I used Linux Mint 8 Main Edition, as I wanted an easy encrypted home partition and my usual XFCE edition wasn't released. For those who don't know, the Main Edition of Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu and is a Gnome environment. It was quite a pleasant experience although I couldn't switch long term. One application I gained a new respect for was Nautilus, the file manager in Gnome. This could be because Thunar, the XFCE file manager still has no tabs. I wanted to have the option of using Nautilus on XFCE, and this is how I did it. This applies to all non-Gnome environments.

I'm not particularly keen on Gnome, partly because it's kinda slow on my old P4 desktop and partly because of little things like right clicking on the desktop does not produce the applications menu like I'm used to; it's almost always how I open applications, reboot, log off etc. When it does not appear, it's almost as frustrating as Windows to me.

Nautilus has a Gnome characteristic that it's built for an environment and is pretty glued into it. I found that in XFCE there were no additional dependencies, but your mileage may vary, I may have already had them installed and didn't know it. The next thing is that Nautilus wants to take over your desktop by default too. This changes the right click actions to Gnome ones.

First install the usuall way with:

sudo apt-get install nautilus

Then you can run Nautilus and restrict it to just being a file manager though with the following command:

nautilus --no-desktop

I created an icon on my top panel for Nautilus, with that command so when I need it, I have it. It will still run in default mode if you run it from the menu however. To change that you'll have to look in /usr/share/applications for the Nautilus .desktop file, right click and edit it in a plain text editor like GEdit. Change the command it executes to the --no-desktop as shown above and save. Remember these are owned by root so you'll need to open with gksu or sudo.

From my perspective I now have the only thing in Gnome I like, running in an environment which suits me better. Like anything, taste is personal.

The --no-desktop flag is also handy when running Dropbox, as it's integrated with Nautilus alone so far.