Ubuntu – Failed to open home directory

The problem is the applications themselves aren't necessarily using gvfs to do their I/O. Using smb:// should work in Firefox though, but not work by using the File Open dialog. Typing the URL directly into the location bar should work though, assuming that Firefox wasn't recompiled without the "GNOME" integration support.

Apps which do not use gvfs directly to do file I/O will need to open the file via the gvfs mount point (~/.gvfs/ or /run/user/$USER/gvfs/) to be able to interact with it. Opening a file in Libreoffice from within Thunar probably works because it's using the mount point path, rather than an smb:// URL to the file.

I had this problem too and I'll bet yours is the same.

It only happened with some shares. I had guest ok = Yes, but the permissions only allowed the owner to list the directory contents.

For example:

[documents]
    path = /home/ghodmode/Documents
    read only = No
    guest ok = Yes

... and ...

ghodmode@server ~ % ls -dl /home/ghodmode/Documents/
drwxr--r-- 12 ghodmode ghodmode 4096 Dec 14 03:32 /home/ghodmode/Documents/

The result was exactly the error message you described. This tells me that nautilus will access shares on a server as a guest user when it can even if it has already accessed other shares as a logged in user.

The default guest user is "nobody".

The solution for me was to change the permissions. I suspect that setting guest ok = No would also work.