Grüne Ecke

For about half a year or more I have been using Ubuntu with a defunct nautilus-open-terminal addition to the Nautilus file manager.  It adds a shortcut to the context and file menu of Nautilus reading „Open in terminal“ or something like that (in German it is „In Terminal öffnen“).

However, when I clicked it, no terminal used to pop up anymore.  Today I once dealt with the problem again and changed the Gnome default application for terminal emulation to xterm and was surprised: the open terminal shortcut worked again!

Well, the solution is that gnome-default-applications-properties (System > Settings > Default Applications) did not correctly update the command line option for the respective terminal emulator.  xterm takes a „-e“ (which was set here) to execute commands, as nautilus-open-terminal presumably does, but gnome-terminal wants a „-x“ for this (-e exists as well but wants the command quoted as a string).  The default applications tool did not update this field.

So I had to correct the parameter myself:

• launch gconf-editor
• navigate to /desktop/gnome/applications/terminal
• change value of key exec_arg to -x for gnome-terminal or to -e for xterm

What is left to wonder about is, why it did not work for me on this computer but it did on my laptop.  I assume I have never switched the default terminal there and the correct paramter for the default gnome-terminal has thus been save.  I did not find a bug report on Launchpad either.  Maybe I will file one but before I do so I might consider updating to Lucid, Ubuntu’s latest version…

Update:  After the update to Lucid, it works correctly via the GUI as well.