ubuntu 18.10: pdf thumbnails does'nt work

Although evince-thumbnailer is already installed and everything seems to be fine, no pdf thumbnails have appeared in Nautilus.

I tried two fresh installs in two different machines and one more in a virtual box machine and the funny thing is that if you boot in a live cd mode then the thumbnailer seems to work fine.


I just found a workaround here on Launchpad.

In brief:

  1. Edit the file /etc/apparmor.d/local/usr.bin.evince (e.g., sudo nano /etc/apparmor.d/local/usr.bin.evince)

  2. Add the line owner /tmp/{,.}gnome_desktop_thumbnail.* w, at the end of usr.bin.evince (in my case it was empty), and save.

  3. Run the command sudo apparmor_parser -r /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince.

That's it! It works immediately...


Thank you for the issue,

Actually, for me it works with "owner /tmp/{,.}gnome-desktop-thumbnailer.* w," According to the link you have shared.

You have writen "owner /tmp/{,.}gnome_desktop_thumbnail.* w," but it didn't works with this code. The différencies are "_" replaced by "-" and "thumbnail" replaced by "thumbnailer"


Another workaround is to purge evince with

sudo apt purge evince

and reinstall it with snap

snap install evince

After deleting .cache/thumbnails and a reboot, .pdf thumbnails immediately work.