Creating menu launcher

[varaonaid]

Hello!

I recently installed Mandriva on a laptop. Ubuntu has been my primary distro for over a year but wouldn't even boot on this hardware. Mandriva worked flawlessly out of the box so I went with it. I'm using the 2008.1 Gnome version.

I'm having trouble with a couple of things, though, that I can't figure out what's going wrong. I'm trying to create a launcher on the main menu that allows me to open nautilus in root/superuser mode. I've tried a couple of different commands, including the one that works on my ubuntu install (gksu nautilus) but Mandriva said that it couldn't find that command (or something similar). I've tried su -root nautilus and even just nautilus to try to get the launcher working even without the root permissions. None of them works. What could be going wrong?

Also, I'm trying to change the default application that runs when I play a cd or dvd. Previously (on ubuntu 7.10) I could go to system>preferences>removable drives and media>multimedia tab which would allow me to choose which programs I want to handle dvd's, cd's, and digital music files. However, that option isn't there in this version of Mandriva. How would I accomplish this same task? Using the "preferred apps" option hasn't worked at all either nor has running gconf-editor and changing the /desktop/gnome/applications/media/ key. I'm kinda stumped but can't imagine that other people don't also want to change their default apps.

Any help would be really, really appreciated! Thanks so much in advance.

Rae

[varaonaid]

OK, found one of the issues - partly. In nautilus, under edit>preferences>media, I found the settings I was looking for. Unfortunately, it doesn't work through. even though I choose VLC, when it opens it up when a dvd is entered, VLC locks. When I chose "ask me every time" then I opt for VLC when I put in a dvd, I get the same problem. However, if I open VLC from the main menu and choose open disc, it's flawless.

I'd just choose to use totem but it doesn't work well either. The video playback quality is just awful and I can't seem to improve it whereas VLC looks great.

[daik]

This sounds odd, while I have not tried this myself, do you have any logs for vlc (can't remember at the top of my head how happy vlc is to log information). It almost sounds like a problem in how Nautilus and VLC communicate with each other. Maybe you need to write a small shellscript that "translates" between Nautilus to VLC. I'm just guessing here.