I have been having an issue with the nautilus right-click menu for some time, which happens to affect my ability to select and move files to other VM’s, and its not really clear why.
Sometimes the right click menu works and sometimes it does nothing when trying to send a file or even open or rename a selected entry. I select the file, right click on that file to send, and then select “Copy to other AppVM” or even just “rename”, and nothing happens. Double clicking on Open will work and pressing F2 will rename the selected item, but clicking the menu entry does absolutely nothing.
The odd thing is it may work for a while and then stop working later in that same session. Obviously the menu has other entries that also stop working so its not just the Qubes extension that stops, but I know that the qubes extension is playing with that menu to insert itself so it might somehow be at fault. I don’t know but it seems plausible.
If I open a terminal in the AppVM and do a “sudo dnf reinstall nautilus” (CoW overwrite) then the menu suddenly starts working again. If I do the same in the Fedora template for that VM and then restart the AppVM then nothing changes.
So next I figured I would try reinstalling the qubes-core-agent-nautilus in the template just in case something there might be causing an issue, but then I got the following errors:
$ sudo dnf search qubes-core-agent-nautilus
Last metadata expiration check: 2:43:36 ago on Mon Feb 26 14:30:22 2024.
==================================================================== Name Exactly Matched: qubes-core-agent-nautilus ====================================================================
qubes-core-agent-nautilus.x86_64 : Qubes integration for Nautilus
$ sudo dnf install qubes-core-agent-nautilus
packages.microsoft.com 526 B/s | 481 B 00:00
Package qubes-core-agent-nautilus-4.1.42-1.fc38.x86_64 is already installed.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
$ sudo dnf reinstall qubes-core-agent-nautilus
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:16 ago on Mon Feb 26 17:14:23 2024.
Installed package qubes-core-agent-nautilus-4.1.42-1.fc38.x86_64 (from qubes-vm-r4.1-current) not available.
Error: No packages marked for reinstall.
So, somehow the repository knows about the package but its not available for install? If its not available for [re]installation then perhaps I have not been receiving updates and thus my installed plugin is out of sync with the current nautilus? Something is obviously playing games with the menu and messing things up and this seems like it might be the possible culprit. Unfortunately I don’t know anything about nautilus plugin implementation or how to debug them.
I do plan on upgrading to Qubes 4.2 in the near future but I can’t do it just yet, and no doubt I will need this feature for getting prepared for that grand event. I could try upgrading the template to f39 but that too will need to wait a week or two.
Any ideas? Are there any nautilus configuration files that might get corrupted, then fixed in userspace upon reinstall in the AppVM, then again get corrupted during further use? A work around is to just keep reinstalling nautilus whenever it stops working but that is a pain.