Using xdg-open for accessing network with normal explorer

Question

I'm working with small network and I want to start network explorer from a terminal. When I tried to type xdg-open network:///server it opened google chrome and did nothing. I also tried to type smb://server but it hasn't helped me. I really need to run it from terminal. Does anybody know how can I do it?

Answer 1

I think I see what you're attempting to do. On my system (Redhat Fedora 14) using GNOME desktop I have a choice of Network in Nautilus.

           

It's also accessible under the Places pulldown.

                                                    

                                                        

Any of the following commands open the Network Browser for me.

% xdg-open 'Network:'
% xdg-open 'network:'

NOTE: Either of the above with any number of trailing slashes appears to work too!

% xdg-open 'Network:/'
% xdg-open 'network://'
% xdg-open 'Network:///'

Tips for mounting SMB shares

xdg-open doesn't appear to be able to mount shares that aren't mounted. For example, here's a SMB share that hasn't been explicitly mounted yet via Nautilus:

% xdg-open 'smb://MYDOM;sam@bart/sam'
gvfs-open: smb://MYDOM;sam@bart/sam/: error opening location: The specified location is not mounted

However if I manually mount it in Nautilus it then can be accessed using xdg-open:

                                                        

% xdg-open 'smb://MYDOM;sam@bart/sam'

If you'd like to avoid the step of making the SMB mount manually you could use the GNOME applet, Gigolo, which will automatically mount any shares you specify. See this page for more info on the Gigolo website and also this video.

EDIT #1

In discussing this with OP he's using Mint 14 (Nadia), which includes a fork of Nautilus from GNOME 2 & 3. These forks are called MATE and Nemo respectively.

There is a known issue with these forks that I mentioned to OP in this launchpad issue. Specifically, there was a patch that supposedly fixed the issue with xdg-open.