16.04 - sudo nautilus does not open in unity bar

Question

In Ubuntu 16.04: when I run sudo nautilus from the terminal, a new window pops up but no arrow indicating an opened window appears besides the nautilus icon at the unity panel. When I minimize the root window and then click again on the icon, instead of opening the root window, a new non-root window pops up and suddenly two arrows appear near the nautilus icon. (Not even scrolling on top of the icon works to show the minimized window.) When I close the non-root window, only then the arrow indicating the root window stays on the panel and everything works like it should.

I also tried removing the nautilus icon from the panel and run sudo nautilus from the terminal. In that case a new icon appears with the arrow and everything behaves normal.

Is there a way to fix this? It is annoying.

Answer 1

First killall nautilus processes:

sudo killall nautilus

Then re-install the data package:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall nautilus-data

Answer 2

I had this problem with Ubuntu 16.04, kernel 4.6. I followed these instructions and it's working now. Nautilus won't launch [16.04]

Kill nautilus process, reinstall data:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall nautilus-data

and try again.

Answer 3

For ownership of files reasons, using sudo for nautilus is not preferable. Having researched various responses, in particular this and this post, neither are the gksu or gksudo commands.

Instead, it's suggested to use pkexec. You can install this and add it to nautilus via :

sudo apt-get install nautilus-admin

Running pkexec from a terminal will still not let you see the window on the unity bar.

However, by installing pkexec through nautilus-admin there is a right click option in user version of nautilus to open as an administrator. I found this window will retain an arrow in the unity bar along with the original window it was opened from (ie, close the original window just to have an administrator nautilus window open)!

Answer 4

There might be possibility of another File Manager is running in background. I had the same problem previously, Nemo was running in background. After killing Nemo process Nautilus started to work. (As I never use Nemo, I removed that program and now everything works great).

note: As I don't have enough reputation to add comment, I have given answer here. Thanks

Answer 5

Method: Just open the terminal and type nautilus.

The disk icons will show up again and they will not disappear when you minimize them.

Had the same problem since I removed the disk icon (not nautilus icon) from the unity bar.

apt-get remove and apt-get install commands won't work.