Ubuntu
nautilus package

How to fall back to an earlier version of Nautilus?

Asked by bsalem

I recently installed U 10.10 and Nautilus worked fine out of the box, especially with a cranky Western Digital 1.5 TB My Book drive with one big NTFS filesystem ( That can be up to 2.2 TB). Then the Update Manager did updates to the kernel and the file manager. I began to experience long delays in getting the windows of the file manager with spinners on for a couple of minutes or more. I tested with the shell and other file managers and did not see the hangs. I liked the new feature in N. that if you tried to replace an image with a file of the same name it shows you the thumbnails side by side and asks if you want to do the replace. I am trying to remove duplicate images.

The version of N. is 2.32.2.1 and I have filed a bug #709935 against it which has not been taken on after a week or more. I have tried there to provide as much troubleshooting there as I possibly can, including error output from the program itself.

I still have U 9.04 where the version of N. is 2.04. I do not have the hang problem with that config although the new feature noted above that I like is not present.

I think that something in the upgrade which happened around the end of January for U 10.10 broke nautilus and I would like to uninstall that latest version and get an earlier package and install it. What version was released with U 10.10? Can I get it still?

I don't think this is a kernel or driver problem since other file managers do not show the problem and the version shipped on the DVD did not have the problem.

There is an old program, CQview, which is not supported, but which will install and works. It shows a large thumbnails of images that have the same name when you want to replace them. It is a workaround. Its supported replacement GQview does not have the thumbnail feature, which is mysterious to me as that is the chief reason I use the program CQview.

So, I want to fall back to the original version of Nautilus and remove the upgraded version. I am surprised that the support team is not more serious about my bug, maybe it is because of Unity and doing away with Gnome.

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Manfred Hampl
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bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#1

The kernel info is:

$ uname -a
Linux brucesalem-FQ582AA-ABA-SR5710F 2.6.35-25-generic #44-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 21 17:40:48 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux

This may have been the date of the upgrade.

I am asking about the mechanics of finding which revs of the program I can use with this kernel, if there are dependancies and how to get a down-rev version, hopefullly what was available soon after U 10.10 went stable and how to remove and reinstall the packages. I don't simply want to remove the package and reinstall it. I want to go to a slightly earlier package instance.

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bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#2

I want to report that today after using some other programs with the disk, I found Nautilis and the disk behaving as though there had never been a problem. I was able to use it as I had in the past and with nominal performance.

In the bug I had reported cases where hung subprocesses were creating the problem. I think that some orphaned or more hidden process has hung the device in the past and performance improves when it dies.

The question is how does one find processes that are hanging the device? I tried top(1) but I could see nothing indicative. There used to be a command on Solaris, fson, which could tell you PID, owner, and command. What can you do in U 19.10?

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bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#3

I want to report that today after using some other programs with the disk, I found Nautilis and the disk behaving as though there had never been a problem. I was able to use it as I had in the past and with nominal performance.

In the bug I had reported cases where hung subprocesses were creating the problem. I think that some orphaned or more hidden process has hung the device in the past and performance improves when it dies.

The question is how does one find processes that are hanging the device? I tried top(1) but I could see nothing indicative. There used to be a command on Solaris, fson, which could tell you PID, owner, and command. What can you do in U 19.10?

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bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#4

I still want to know how to find the earlier package and install it it I want. Re: my latest bug I know that gvfsd-metadata is the process that causes nautilus the hang, and there are many bugs against it,
a couple of critical ones. The process is part of the Gnome Virtual Filesystem, which given the decision to replace Gnome with Unity, may be a factor in that. This raises a question of trying to run KDE instead of Gnome from login. I saw no session menu as there was in U 9.04. Can one do that in U 10.10 without having to install Kbuntu on a new partition?

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bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#5

So, what does gbfsd-metata really do? There is no man page. Does it move files that are changing to the virtual fs for Gnome and move them back to the target disk? Or does it simply maintain all the pretty data for the file manager such as thumbnals? It is clearly the bottle neck on my system. Top(1) says that it is using 100% of the CPU and it has lots of elapsed time too. Can it be disabled? Is there some option to turn off?

There is clearly a problem with old or slow disks, and like one of the other bugs on this, the in-use light is constant while this beast is running. When only a few megs of data are to be moved from one place on the disk to another the delay while this process runs is a minute or more, just to move a little bit of data.

Did someone misconfigure the file manager in the latest upgrade so ths process runs much more than t used to? I did not have this problem until after a kernel upgrade with new file manager on Jan 21. I had installed U 10.10 a few days before and did not have the problem. I did not have the problem in U 9.04 and tested the disk with that version to see if the problem existed. It did not.

With the number of people who have been notified about this and the deafining silence on the problem, not even a peep, I gather that it may have been no good to move from an unsupported release to a supported release.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#6

If you need information about the history of packages in ubuntu, you can find that on launchpad.

On the page https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+publishinghistory you can see the version development of nautilus on ubuntu.

It shows that the first Maverick (=10.10) development version was 1:2.30.0-0ubuntu4
the one that was delivered with the public release of Maverick was 1:2.32.0-0ubuntu1
and the current one in Maverick-updates is 1:2.32.0-0ubuntu1.3

If you are using a version of 2.32.2.1 you are using the Natty one? Or is it just a typo error?

According to that table 9.04 (=jaunty) had versions between 1:2.24 and 1:2.26, but not 2.04, so another typo error?

If you really want to go back to an older version of a package, there are ways to do so. You can either just manually download and install a package with a lower version number, or you can fix a desired version number in package management programs. In any case beware of dependecies! And make sure not to let the system upgrade back to higher versions with the next update.

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bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#7

Thank You, I did make a mistake reporting the version of nautilus on U 9.04, I am visually impaired and misread my notes and reported the version of another program. It is 2.26.2. The version on U 10.10 I am using was given as 2.32.0 in the "about" menu item. I was guessing about the minor mode syntax when I reported it as 2.32.2.1, so that is wrong.

I could get 1:2.32.0-0ubuntu1 but don't know if it works with the kernel version ( see uname -a output above ) and you indicated the risk of unresolved dependencies.

I have kept this question open as a pointer to engineers that some problem involving gbfsd-metadata was created by package changes I applied on Jan 21. There may be a change in code or configuration that adversely affects performance of nautilus with slow disks that appeared between the version of the 10.10 release and the one I got in the update of Jan 21. As I know that there are some serious bugs open on gbfsd-metadata, I thought that my experience could be useful to engineering. I suspect that poor performance of my disk could be a cause of this, but only because something changed in the app and as the problem is beating up my disk, I wanted to know what can be done about it short of manually killing gbfsd-metadata every time it hogs resources, which I don't think is graceful as I don't know what it really does,

If you think this question should really be added to one of the gbfsd-metadata bugs, kindly indicate which one.

I have even explored running KDE as my window manager instead of Gnome, but even though I can run several alternative file managers, including Dolphin, on Gnome, they do not do the compare with thrubnails on images that have the same name when you want to merge them. That was a new and welcome nautilus feature that came with the U 10.10 release. It was not in U 9.04. Is that the cause ofthe gbfsd-metadata bottleneck, though?

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Best Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#8

Launchpad bugs and Google indeed show serveral problem reports with gvfs. One maybe useful hint is shown in http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1421580 To summarize it up it says that the contents of ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata might cause the gvfsd-metadata process to run into a loop consuming up to 100% cpu. According to the messages there, the commands

rm -rf ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
pkill gvfsd-metadata

should remedy that. To be honest I also do not know what the contents of that file do, and I am not sure if this will help on your system, but it might be worth trying.

++++++++++++++++++++

I would not expect any problems by mixing an older maverick nautilus version like 1:2.32.0-0ubuntu1 with your current kernel (or any kernel update coming in near future). If you want to downgrade nautilus you can do that by forcing a version as shown in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticHowto This should even tell you about required dependencies (e.g. you might have to force the same version also for nautilus-data, nautilus-dbg and libnautilus-extension1).

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bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#9

Thank You.

Scrubbing the metadata as you suggest above seemed to fix this problem. Up to the moment I tried
the two commands the performance of the disk was degrading. After I tested and got good response
even with file moves and creating dirs. This seems to be a good workaround. I let the disk finish what
it was doing first, always a good idea. Before I consider going to a different rev with this symptom I
will try the two command fix.

Revision history for this message
bsalem (bruce-euphon) said : 		#10

Thanks Manfred Hampl, that solved my question.