Ubuntu – Can’t run “shared library” in nautilus

There are several caveats in what you tried to do. I already mentioned the danger introduced by your approach:

Next time nautilus is going to be updated, your dolphin gets overwritten (as your link points there). Same goes for gnome-terminal.

So we figured, this was not a good idea :)

But there are some ways to try working around, so "x" gets run when "z" was requested -- but I'm not aware of any as soon not "z", but "/full/path/to/z" gets called. As long as it is just "z":

• creating an alias for z, like alias z=x (works on a per-user-level -- or globally, depending on where it was defined)
• creating a "replacement" for z in a location mentioned in the PATH before the location the real z resides in

A little more details on the second approach. Taking your original problem, you want to have dolphin executed whenever nautilus is called upon. You already found nautilus at /usr/bin/nautilus. Now let's (probably correctly) assume your $PATH contains (in this order) /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin -- so you see /usr/local/bin would be searched before /usr/bin. So we simply create a shell script /usr/local/bin/nautilus with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/dolphin %$@

So what will happen? If you (or some script/program/daemon/...) invokes nautilus, this will execute /usr/local/bin/nautilus (as this is the first "nautilus" found in the PATH), which simply starts /usr/bin/dolphin -- voila! But if the "whatever" uses the full path, this won't work.

So you say: Hey, why didn't Izzy say "just do a ln -s /usr/bin/dolphin /usr/local/bin/nautilus?" Sure you can do that -- and it will work the same. But using a script as shown may come in handy if you need to introduce additional parameters which are not passed with the original call. With above script, dolphin simply gets passed the same parameters the original call used (%$@). But you can play around with things in the script, replace parameters, etc. As for your current problem, the link would be enough (as long as nautilus doesn't get called with the full path).

No, your shared library should be installed:

• to /usr/lib directly
• or to /usr/lib/<package-name> with a shortcut in /usr/lib

The manual means:

• by supporting files like plugins and modules (in binary form) that your program would scan them by itself. They could be shared libs .so or any other format, even custom formats.
• by run-time support programs the executable programs that are used by your program, but are not useful for the user to run them directly, so that note suggests to avoid installing them to /usr/bin

The support files in text format (not generated-binary at least) are more convenient to be installed in /usr/share/<package-name>

I would recommend to you, making quick look on examples from other packages.

tree /usr/lib/libreoffice/
tree /usr/lib/gimp/