Nautilus not working on sudo

I've got Trisquel 7 GNU/Linux distro, with GNOME 3.8.4.

I'm finding impossible to create a folder in Nautilus, or drag and drop files into the Desktop, out of other options. I find this quite strange, as I'm used to work with only-root live USBs, and I still don't understand the user system n Linux. Whenever I try to perform any action, Nautilus won't react; here I have some code I've tried...

REGULAR ENTRY: $ NAUTILUS

xvlaze@linux0:~$ nautilus
** (nautilus:4627): WARNING **: Couldn't register with accessibility bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

SUDO NAUTILUS

[Same message]

SU

root@linux0:/home/xvlaze# nautilus Unable to initialize DBus connection: Connection is closed (nautilus:4672): GLib-GIO-CRITICAL **: g_dbus_interface_skeleton_export: assertion 'G_IS_DBUS_CONNECTION (connection)' failed Error creating proxy: Connection is closed (g-io-error-quark, 18) Error creating proxy: Connection is closed (g-io-error-quark, 18) Error creating proxy: Connection is closed (g-io-error-quark, 18) Error creating proxy: Connection is closed (g-io-error-quark, 18)
(nautilus:4672): libunity-CRITICAL **: unity-launcher.vala:154: Unable to connect to session bus: Connection is closed
(nautilus:4672): libunity-CRITICAL **: unity-launcher.vala:154: Unable to connect to session bus: Connection is closed
(nautilus:4672): dconf-WARNING **: failed to commit changes to dconf: Connection is closed
(nautilus:4672): dconf-WARNING **: failed to commit changes to dconf: Connection is closed No DBus connection available

I have never experienced something similar before, even when using other people's Linux computers. Does anybody have experienced something like this?

1 Answer

This sounds like a problem with your current installation of Nautilus, as if it had been corrupted somewhere during an upgrade or a re-install.

I would try re-installing Nautilus from scratch:

killall nautilus
apt-get purge nautilus
apt-get update
apt-get install nautilus

EDIT:

The problem is that root has neither an Xscreen session, nor a dbus connection. Different distros deal with this differently, for instance on my Kubuntu your command above works out of the box. The standard solution in these cases is to use gksu instead of sudo, because gksudo has been designed to address exactly these two problems.

Alternatively, you may enable root access to your screen (xhosts +) and add root to the dbus group,

 gpasswd -a root dbus

Should this not be enough, you will have to look into polkit for Gnome, something however which I have never done, and on which I cannot offer any guidance.