Alt+F2 - ssh:// and smb:// access doesn't work in Unity (should open Nautilus)

Thank you for your bug report, would be nice to get back indeed, Didier said he would work on that

can be an easy fix for anyone wanted to work on that (grepping the activation result and launching the right nautilus command).
Please, ping on #ayatana if anyone is waiting to work on that :)

@didrocks ping! I'd like to take care of this bug if it's ok for you. I've already assigned it to me.
We'll talk tomorrow so you can give me some suggestion about how to start :)

Is there a list of supported services? I mean.... how can I know if it's a simple command or a "url" to be properly handled?
In the case of Unity-2D we can manage "ssh://...." ulrs using the QDesktopServices class, but in case of a command we should use QProcess instead. Any ideas about this?

I think I've partially solved this by updating the /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop file, and changing this line:

MimeType=inode/directory;application/x-gnome-saved-search;
to be:
MimeType=inode/directory;application/x-gnome-saved-search;x-scheme-handler/smb;x-scheme-handler/ssh;

Then running sudo update-desktop-database to update the file /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

Hat tip to the instructions here: http://jarrpa.net/2011/10/28/creating-custom-url-handlers-in-ubuntu-11-04-11-10-gnome-3-0/

I'm not certain that this entirely works (it's not quite deterministic), but I'll give the machine a rebot and see if its stuck.

This works because this patch was added:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~unity-team/unity-lens-applications/trunk/revision/202

This calls AppInfo.launch_default_for_uri (orig, null), which looks up the native gnome url handler.

Something that really isn't documented anywhere - to get debug output, find the program like so:

david@silver:~/unity-lens-applications-0.4.12$ ps axfu|grep lens
david 15396 0.0 0.6 206424 13268 ? Sl 01:04 0:03 /usr/lib/unity-lens-applications/unity-applications-daemon

Kill it and restart it, and then it will produce output like this:

david@silver:~/unity-lens-applications-0.4.12$ kill 15396
david@silver:~/unity-lens-applications-0.4.12$ /usr/lib/unity-lens-applications/unity-applications-daemon
(process:4185): unity-applications-daemon-DEBUG: daemon.vala:256: Building initial application menu

Leaving the program running, run the command that isn't working, and this will get outputted:

(process:4185): unity-applications-daemon-WARNING **: daemon.vala:744: Failed to launch URI ssh://throium

So, smb://server name worked, but ssh://server didn't.

Added this line: daemon.vala:745 warning ("Error %s", error.message);

rebuilt from source package unity-lens-applications-0.4.12 )

Tried mounting a ssh://server, and got this error message:

(process:11025): unity-applications-daemon-WARNING **: daemon.vala:744: Failed to launch URI ssh://thorium
(process:11025): unity-applications-daemon-WARNING **: daemon.vala:745: Error The specified location is not mounted

Mounting a previously not mounted smb server doesn't cause this error, even when the smb server doesn't respond, or fails to respond with a list of shares.

Starting the command on the command line: nautilus ssh://server
then logging in,
then closing the nautilus window (though not unmounting it)
then running the ssh://server from the Alt-F2 prompt succeeds.

This bug was fixed in the package unity-lens-applications - 5.8.0-0ubuntu1

---------------
unity-lens-applications (5.8.0-0ubuntu1) precise-proposed; urgency=low

  * New upstream release.
    - Dash - No message displayed when no results are returned in the
      Dash (LP: #711199)
    - Dash - When multiple results have equal string match relevancy ranking,
      those with equal ranking should be then sorted by frequency of use.
      (LP: #871900)
    - Dash - Combined filters lead to wrong search result in Applications lens
      (LP: #942878)
    - Alt+F2 - ssh:// and smb:// access doesn't work in Unity (should open
      Nautilus) (LP: #770126)
 -- Didier Roche <email address hidden> Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:23:52 +0100