File-roller "Open With" GDBus error

sparr · September 24, 2024, 3:02pm

I think the relevant components here are all part of the default install. I’ve only been using EOS for about a week. pacman says that file-roller was “Install Reason : Explicitly installed”, but I don’t think I did that manually, so I suspect it was part of the installer? It also says file-roller is “Optional For : thunar-archive-plugin” which could be relevant since xfce is using thunar as its default file manager.

I opened a zip file with file-roller (the default association), right clicked on a file in the zip, chose Open With, and received an error dialog as follows:

Could not perform the operation
GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name is not activatable
[Close]

I wasn’t able to reproduce this on arch, but I have a variety of additional gnome and gtk packages on my arch system.

joekamprad · September 24, 2024, 3:18pm

thunar can use different file compression tools.

ark (optional)
engrampa (optional)
file-roller (optional)
xarchiver (optional)

You could try using another one (remove one install the other)

smokey · September 24, 2024, 3:36pm

I often switch between the gnomes File-Roller and kdes Ark. I’ve found file roller better for exploring but ark better for compression (faster and smoother)

sparr · September 24, 2024, 3:38pm

Yeah, I already switched to xarchiver, but I thought it was worth reporting what seems like a problem in the base/default system?

UncleSpellbinder · September 24, 2024, 3:56pm

When I was using Thunar, engrampa worked quite well for me.

anon93652015 · September 24, 2024, 3:56pm

Shoutout to engrampa which is file-roller without libadwaita.

joekamprad · September 24, 2024, 4:11pm

i do use engrampa here too on my i3 setup, but i see:

https://github.com/endeavouros-team/calamares/blob/9ed727a129228fef022f4125cf0deaf20e1581bb/data/eos/modules/packagechooser.conf#L286

I will check if we need to change this.

Cinnamon has it as a dependency for nemo-fileroller
Gnome its the adwaita (only-one)
Budgie uses nemo so same
lxqt uses its own tool based on engrempa (mate)
lxde has file-roller not ideal as it is fully gtk2 still
i3 has xarchiver what is not the best but works…

joekamprad · September 24, 2024, 4:32pm

yes… makes it bad for lxde and everywere libadwaita is not default…

joekamprad · September 24, 2024, 4:53pm

general it is still working fine to use file-roller on xfce4 only it uses default adwaita light theme…
The trick currently is to add gtk theme in env:

/etc/environment systemwide or ~/.config/environment.d/userenv.conf per user

export GTK_THEME=Arc-Dark
export GTK_ICON_THEME=Qogir-dark

With this libadwaita apps will use the set theme… issue is that we can not set this by default as it will not change when user is changing theme…

smokey · September 24, 2024, 5:19pm

Although a downside the upside is it adds a little bit of learning to things in an easy way.

joekamprad · September 24, 2024, 5:26pm

ha ha yea as always… but gtk is messed up at the moment… could be next update and it will not work anymore with the env “hack”

smokey · September 24, 2024, 5:28pm

Just a bit more learning along the way

SynAck · March 21, 2025, 2:15am

What I chose to do for applying the theme to File Roller (& I’m sure someone will let me know if it’s a bad idea, “the more you know” ) is to edit the FileRoller.desktop file to specify the theme to use when calling File Roller (might be overwritten during updates?):

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/FileRoller.desktop

Change:
Exec="file-roller %U"

To:
Exec=bash -c "GTK_THEME=your-preferred-theme-name file-roller %U"

I later changed this to use a $(command) substitution querying the current GTK theme so that it always matches even if I change my theme (until it breaks ) & consequently should also work for multi-user systems where each user may have a different theme:
Exec=bash -c "GTK_THEME=$(gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme | tr -d \\"'\\") file-roller %U"

The theme query result wraps the current theme name in single quotes (‘your-preferred-theme-name’) so the command substitution includes piping the result to tr to remove the single quote characters, this required escaping the " in the command with \ which itself required escaping hence \\"'\\".

I works when launching File Roller directly or when opening an archive file associated with File Roller:

But not when invoking an archive/extract action from context menus (maybe some other app is used then instead?):

Hope this helps others. Please contribute if you know how to alter the theme for compress/extract actions.