I played around for "way too long" trying to do this. Perhaps there is a secret method ... but I ended up setting my links from thunar to nautalus. Just changing the "preferred program" to nautalus doen't do the trick.

Thanks Mellowbob. If no one can give the insight of the xfce file manager configuration, I'll give up and just change the /usr/bin/thunar link to nautilus. Any side effect for just changing the links? I mean, given that so many things related to file manager, could some setup   be missing from simple changing link?

Cheers.

Jupiter

Did you search this forum? IIRC there's a thread about this.
Have you changed the 'Preferred Application' settings?
xfdesktop has Thunar hard-coded, I think, but even that can be changed maybe with a re-build or with that hack you mentioned.
But if you mess with xfce4-session (or just remove xfdesktop) then you may want to have nautilus manage the desktop instead of xfdesktop.

Thanks for your response. Sorry for not being clear. This is for remote machines, I know I can just click the file manager which switches from thunar to nautilus, but I don't want to open every vnc to change settings manually via GUI. What I try to find is where is the hard coded configuration which I can change it via command line during the installation.

Thank you.

Kind regards,

Jupiter

I installed xfce on CentOS 6.2, the default file manager is thunar, but I want to change the default file manager to nautilus. I searched Internet, some one suggested to change the symbolic link /usr/bin/thunar to nautilus. But I am wondering if there is proper configuration to make the nautilus as a default file manager. Appreciate any responses.

Thank you.

Kind regards.

jupiter