As a follow-up to this, I did the following, and probably would have got it working , except I accidentally creamed my Debian install near the end. (Note, probably not entirely accurate, since it's off the top of my head)
"I've seen a friend use truss on Solaris, I wonder what strace can do?" $ strace -o /tmp/ntrace -e trace=files nautilus start-here:// (or was it nautilus2?) $ vim /tmp/ntrace ooh, vim has strace syntax highlighting - nice! look down thru list to see what nautilus is trying to open Oh, it's looking for "vfolder" stuff - that must be part of how it decides what to display. Go and look inside the "xxxxx.vfolder" files it's looking for with vim (I know they're there since the strace output shows no -ENOENT) The xxx.vfolder file looks xml-ish. It tries to "query" some stuff out of another directory (/etc/X11/starthere/). Go and look in this directory. Oh, it's empty. Well, no wonder. Go to debian packages web-page and query for which packages contain the directory /etc/X11/starthere. It's 'nautilus2'. But nautilus2 says it's installed on my system. Remove and reinstall it and nautilus2-data (using aptitude). Oh dear, now it says it conflicts with itself, and half its files are on the system and half aren't. .... This is where I went wrong (DON'T do this): (from another message I posted elsewhere): su - root ... cd / dpkg --fsys-tarfile /var/cache/apt/archives/nautilus2-xxxxx.deb | tar xvf - ... pull all your hair out now, you probably just clobbered your Debian install. Ahh, the power of root. -Dave.
