Comment 43 for bug 1021375

I too have the nautilus read-only misbehavior on the very latest 12.04LTS (x86_64) system and have the following observations, including a simple-enough workaround since running into this problem quite a while back....

I can cause the false read-only behavior on demand by first inserting a read-only USB flash such as a camera's Secure Digital card with the "lock" switch thrown, via an SD card reader. But after removing/unmounting that read-only SD card, *every* subsequent insertion of a normally-writable USB flash drive then gets the above-reported symptoms: its considered read-only by nautilus yet a "cp" command from the shell to the USB media works fine which shows the system mounted it correctly for writing.

As I believe someone mentioned earlier, it must be that the nautilus state is contaminated/broken under some scenarios. My intentional read-only flash drive method is just one solid way to cause that broken behavior "hangover". So my workaround is....

When I encounter this false read-only, I simply unmount/remove the removable device(s), close any windows using nautilus, and then I do a "killall nautilus" from the shell (I always see a non-window nautilus whose parent is pid 1 with my user id, presumably this is the thing with the broken state that I kill). After that, reinserting the very USB drive which falsely received the read-only error will now work properly. I can drag things onto the drive using the fresh instance of nautilus that is launched..

Its a shame that after more than 2 years, on a claimed LTS system, I have yet to see even a "we aren't going to bother fixing this one" response from the Ubuntu folks on this bug report. Its not been closed or marked as a duplicate, its still marked "unassigned". Makes me question why I've been recommending Ubuntu LTS releases at all to my companies for production use....