How to set Nautilus as the default FTP handler in Linux

Posted on January 22nd, 2010 at 18:03, in How To, Linux, Ubuntu.

After I had installed Firefox 3.6 on my Ubuntu machines I noticed that when I would want to open the FTP bookmarks saved in Nautilus those targets would open in tabs from Firefox. The problem with this approach was that I couldn’t edit files (create, update, delete) the way I could with Nautilus. After some diggings I found out that this change in behavior was due to the fact that at some point I chose Firefox to be the default browser (which was something fully assumed because it’s my favorite browser). Doing this associates Firefox as the handler for ftp:// links instead on relaying that part to Nautilus.

Unfortunately the solution for this problem doesn’t have a graphical approach. It’s not something you choose in your Preferred Applications. Instead one has to edit the %gconf.xml file located in the ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/ftp folder and make it look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
        <entry name="needs_terminal" mtime="1264151220" type="bool" value="false"/>
        <entry name="enabled" mtime="1264151220" type="bool" value="true"/>
        <entry name="command" mtime="1264151220" type="string">
                <stringvalue>/usr/bin/nautilus</stringvalue>
        </entry>
</gconf>

The important line here is the one located between the stringvalue tags. I just hope that in the next versions of GNOME these kind of things will be easier to maintain by providing a GUI for the user. This is one aspect that Linux still has to improve. It won the servers, but let’s make it reach the desktops too.

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