Drag and drop not working on ubuntu
 

Basically when I try to drag and drop a file or shortcut on ubuntu (which is actually ubuntu server 10.04 with gnome installed) the icon just flies back to where it was before, very annoying having to copy and paste everything I want moved!

tried to move things with right mouse button?

I'm not quite sure what you mean, if you use the right click menu that isn't dragging and dropping.

here on xfce&thunar drag'n'drop can be done with right mouse button (press and hold)

Oh right no, sadly that just makes a menu appear.

What's a "shortcut"?

There is no such thing in Linux.

If you mean a desktop icon, that's actually not a shortcut or link, it's a special "desktop file" that contains the command needed to run the program, the program's name in various languages, and the path to the icon.

Or do you mean symlink?

TheMadMoose

See if the following links help u:

http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/0...p-tips-in.html
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-dr...-linux-253699/

What a horrible, misleading video!

It does!

He said "drag and drop doesn't work because of permissions", and then goes on to make a launcher for nautilus as root?

It has nothing to do with drag and drop!

I did not see that video myself, was it really that "horrible" ?

It states a lot of false information and is very misleading.

Basically, they said that "drag and drop is disabled by default in Ubuntu".

Then they went of to say that to "enable drag and drop", you have to make a launcher that runs Nautilus as root.

Drag and drop was always enabled!!! It's just that you, as an unprivileged user, cannot modify system files. And drag and drop isn't just for files, unlike the appearant assumption made by the video's author!

Lol, there's a seven under my name for a reason!

Anyway basically I cannot drag and drop anything, I had seen that video and ignored it in the past, the other link just says how to drag and drop.

The trouble is it actually seems as though it's trying not to let me it even has a little animation where the icon flies back to where it came from!

If it "flies back" that means that you aren't dropping it on a valid target.

Thing is though, I am! Eg dragging a file into a folder, I've done it before on other computers but on this one it wont work.

Do you have permissions for the folder you're dropping onto?

What file manager have you used on those "other computers"?

Well I'm running as root to eliminate any permission problems, I'm just using the default file manager that is with gnome.

Something's changed
 

I'm on 10.04 Lucid Lynx and am having the same issue as the original poster.

I suspect that either Nautilus or Gnome itself has changed its drag-and-drop behaviour recently - probably within the last two or three months.

For example, if I'm on the Birthday Reminder page at Thunderbird add-ons, I used to be able to drag-and-drop the favicon from the Location bar, or even from the History tab, into an open Nautilus window and it would create something like a Birthday\ Reminder.desktop file (a "link" file) whose contents were like the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Birthday Reminder
Type=Link
URL=https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3680/
Icon=gnome-fs-bookmark
Name[en_AU]=Birthday Reminder

When I try to do this now, instead of a nice .desktop file, I get a file named "3680" which is the HTML content of the current page.

Further evidence that this is a change in Nautilus/Gnome: I can drag-and-drop the favicon from Firefox's Location bar into Konqueror and it opens the correct URL. If I then drag-and-drop the favicon from Konqueror's Location bar into Nautilus I again get a HTML file instead of the expected .desktop file.

Can anyone else confirm this behaviour?

Actually, the second behavior makes more sense. Dropping a URL of a remote file copies (downloads) it, just like dropping a local URL (a file on your computer) would copy it.

Actually, it makes no sense at all. Every browser I've used that supports drag-and-drop of the favicon from the location bar has always created a .desktop file (Linux) or .url file (Windows) in the shell.

Nautilus used to do this consistently, but something has changed. For example, I just visited the following URLs in Firefox, waited for the pages to complete loading, and then dragged the favicon from the location bar into a Nautilus window viewing an empty folder...

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Generates a HTML file named: firefox

2. http://www.amazon.com/

Error while copying "/".
There was an error getting information about "/".
Show more details: HTTP Error: Method Not Allowed

3. http://www.ebay.com/

Error while copying "/".
There was an error copying the file into /home/USER/directory.
Show more details: Error opening file '/': Is a directory

4. http://www.wikipedia.org/

Correctly generates a link file named: Link\ to\ Wikipedia.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Link to Wikipedia
Type=Link
URL=http://www.wikipedia.org/
Icon=gnome-fs-bookmark

That's pretty inconsistent behaviour, but at least the .desktop file generation isn't totally and completely broken. It's just Pot Luck.

What I meant was that downloading the HTML would be the natural behavior if someone didn't write code to intervene and create a desktop file.