Login idea

I posted an idea of mine on the Gnome desktop-devel mailinglist as I didn't know sure where to post it. Tell me if you like it :).

See you!

Use another theme for an app

Paul Maddock sent me this nice tip:
To start an application with another theme then the default one, set an environment variable like this (in the terminal):
GTK2_RC_FILES=/usr/share/themes/Simple/gtk-2.0/gtkrc BloGTK
This will make BloGTK use the simple theme.

Thanks Paul,

Cheers!

Kill hanging applications

I just finished an exam and I think I did a great job! Time to provide you with a Gnome-tip, isn't it ? :)
I like to try out bleeding-edge software, so sometimes those programs just crash, hang, misbehave, whatever you call it. Well, there's a quick way to wipe those windows of your screen with the gnome "Force Quit" action-'applet'. Add this to your panel by right-clicking the panel, chosing "add to panel" then dragging the "Force Quit" applet to your panel or double-clicking it. Then, when an application hangs, click the applet, click on the window of the misbehaving program and it will be killed!


cheers!

Gaim 1.1.2

I just logged in and was presented with the "a new version of gaim is available" box. The ChangeLog mentions several fixes for the MSN protocol, which is great for people over here as it's very popular in Belgium/Holland. The gaim website also had a little facelift, looks great!

Bye!

One viewer to rule them all?

Have you ever been dissatisfied with the current document viewer situation in GNOME, because none can serve all your needs? Do you miss a feature in either gpdf or ggv and ended up with xpdf, which doesn't integrate itself very well in the GNOME Desktop? A new project aims to make these problems a thing of the past. It is called evince. The project website states that

The goal of evince is to replace the multiple document viewers that exist on the GNOME Desktop, like ggv, gpdf, and xpdf with a single simple application.

The current version is 0.1 and is already in a usable state, at least my PDFs display without flaws. According to a post of Bryan Clark version 0.2 will be released soon.

More information, downloads and screenshots are available on the evince website.

Default Plugin? No Thanks

Epiphany has a built in feature to install missing plugins if you need them to view a webpage. However, there are plugins that people do not want to have installed, flash being the primary candidate.

The reasons are varied, typically either to avoid contaminating an otherwise completely free computer system, or to make the web a little less annoying by getting rid of all flash-based ads (which often cover the site's content, or have audio).

Unfortunately, Epiphany does not remember the users preference with regard to plugins. Unlike it's behavior with passwords, the only choices are yes or no, with no option to say "Never".

This can be overcome by finding and renaming the file "libnullplugin.so". Different Mozilla based browsers may install it in different locations. On my system, though, Epiphany shares it with Mozilla, and it is located at /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins/libnullplugin.so. You can either use:
cd / && find * | grep libnullplugin.so or, if you have slocate slocate libnullplugin.so to find all instances of it on your system.

Once the offending file has been removed, rename it to something like libnullplugin.so1, and you will never be asked again if you want to install a missing plugin, while having the option to undo this change by simply changing the filename back.

After this fix, both Epiphany and Mozilla treated flash as if it didn't exist, although Firefox still asked if I wanted to install a missing plugin (their dialog is less intrusive, though).

Yay! SAMBA/NFS sharing in Gnome 2.10

Davyd Madeley added some more things to his list today.
This is one of 'm:


This one of these features I always missed in Gnome. Most desktop-oriented distributions ship there own utilities herefor, now I also have this on my Debain :D. Hooray !

He also added type-ahead functionality in the GTK filechooser as a new Gnome 2.10 feature, I already have this in my 2.6 though, anyone who hasn't ?

See you !

An idea about CD ripping

Remember my post about Davyd Madeley's Gnome 2.10 what-to-expect page ? Well, I loaded it again today and I saw it became bigger and bigger. It still says it's a "Work in Progress" so I think we'll have to keep an eye on it!
There some kind of 'competition' between Sound Juicer and Goobox for becoming Gnome's CD-rip application. I think there shouldn't be a specific CD-ripping app in gnome, it should be more integrated. What if I could just insert a music CD, nautilus opens a window with an icon for every track and if I drag (some of) those icons to the desktop it presents me a little dialog where I can chose which encoding to use (default ogg). I think it would be much more intuitive, no ? And for CD playing, that should be done by Gstreamer in Totem or whatever media application.

Please give me your thoughts about this as a comment ;)

Cheers!

Connect to server ...

Since Gnome 2.8, one of the features I love and use the most is the ability to connect to (s)FTP, SMB, WebDav and other servers with nautilus. It's a great feature and I'll apreciate it more and more if more applications will be using Gnome-vfs so I can read/write on/of those locations from all kinds of programs. How to use it?
Open a nautilus-window, click on the menu "File" and select "Connect to server ...". You'll be greeted by this dialog-window:


Then you just fill in the values, and a new icon will appear on your desktop for this connection. I use an ftp-connection all time for this blog. When I make a screenshot, I just drop it in that directory on my Desktop, it asks me for the ftp-password if I didn't acces is yet in that session, and I create a link on my blog. Try it, it's easy!

Ciao!

More 2.10 stuff

Hi,

As seen on this page, it seems like the following Gnome release will ship with a new menu-configuration;

Screenshots (from process-of-elimination.net):








Damn this looks great! It's very consistent as all apps are in the first menu and 'help' and 'network servers' are not in the applications-menu. Though, it was more intuitive to have "log out" and "screenshot" in a menu called "actions" then in this new "Desktop" menu. Why would I - as a new user - click on "Desktop" to log out ? Ok, it's not yet as bad as clicking on "start' to shut down :).

Cheers!

Extra mouse buttons

Commenting on my blog about setting the Nautilus-background using drag 'n drop, Joe Gallo provided us a great hack to use your 6th and 7th mousebuttons* (e.g. left and right). If you use the .imwheelrc-entries he proposed, you'll be able to go back and forth in your epiphany-history with thise extra buttons. You can also set other keys to use those buttons to go to the next/previous workspace (Ctrl-Alt-{left|right}), application in the alt-tab menu ({Alt-Tab|Shift-Alt-Tab}), tab in the active window (Ctrl-{PgUp|PgDwn}) etc. Have fun ;)!

Cheers!



* left-button is 1
middle button is 2
right-button is 3
mousewheel up is 4
mousewheel down is 5
so extra buttons are 6,7...

Stats

Hooray, the number of people checking my rss-feed if raising [1] and the number of daily hits stabilized around 350 [2] :D. Hey, what ?! This ain't slashdot! :)
Thank you all for reading my blog, commenting on it, giving ideas, writing fanmail, keeping me awake on IM etc ;).

Cheers!

[1] thanks to feedburner
[2] thanks to nedstat

Gnome 2.10 - what to expect

Should I or should I not ? Maybe it's not right to do it !? Anyway, here we go (says the devil in me):
I read on planet gnome in Davyd Madeley's last blog he's working on a webpage listing new features to expect in Gnome 2.10 like he did it for Gnome 2.8. He didn't say it was online yet and didn't give a link as he's still working on it. Though, I changed the '8' to a '10' in the URL of his Gnome 2.8 feature-list and ... Thadaaaah! There it was, not very huge (yet) but already a great sneak peek: features we'll see in Gnome 2.10

Enjoy!

Drag to set nautilus background

Hiho,

before I forget it, here's your gnome-tip-of-the-day :);
To quickly set a background of a nautilus-window you can drag an image to the window with the middle mouse button pressed. When you release the button a menu will pop up, where you can choose "Set as background".


Cheers!

Gnome-blog 0.8

Seth Nickell released a new version of Gnome-blog, his Gnome-blogging-applet. Yay, we have drag 'n drop of images and spelling-correction now! You don't know how yet much I love the first one and you'll adore the last ;). I'm not yet using it right now as I had trouble installing it. Lazy me downloaded the rpm-package and converted it to .deb with alien. It installed fine but wouldn't load. Maybe I'll just wait for debian to package it :).

Image (from Seth Nickell's blog):


Cheers!

Set buddy-icon on gaim

I had someone asking me how to set your buddy-icon (aka 'avatar') in Gaim. Today I saw someone came across my blog searching for "set picture of yourself gaim" on Google. Therefor: a short explanation about how to set up buddy-icons on Gaim :).

1. Open the account editor: press Ctrl-A or select "Accounts" in the "Tools"-menu.
2. Select the desired account: click on it.
3. Click on "Modify".
4. Drag a picture to the dialogwindow appearing or browse for it on your filesystem.

I hope this post will come up on if someone searchs for this :)

Ciao!

Gnome journal

Gnome Journal published a new issue lately containing 6 great articles. "Experimental culture" is a great read about the gnome-surrounding culture, how it's defined, and how Seth Nickel sees it's future. There's also an article describing how to burn CD's and DVD's with nautilus. I like this. So much gnome-users complain there's no good burning-program that fits in Gnome, well, for data nautilus is a great and intuitive solution. I also heard, never tried it, you can write audio CD's with Muine (or was it Rhythmbox ? I'm too lazy to search it out); ifso, that's another problem solved. It would be great to have 'real' burning apps for gnome too though, and they're on their way ! The other articles are also well written; I think the best way to comment on them is on Footnotes.

Cheers.

PS: someone posted another great trick as comment on my previous blog. If you set up your default browser (Applications -> Desktop Preferences -> Advanced -> Preferred Applications) to "epiphany -n %s", external applications will open pages in a new tab instead of a new window. Thanks!

Nautilus hide-script

Welcome!

Wouter Bolsterlee commented on my blog about the .hidden-trick and posted a Nautilus-script he wrote. Nice! How to use this script ? Copy the code he posted, paste it in a new file and save this in /home/username/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts (create this directory if it doesn't exist) as "Don't show in nautilus", "Hide" or whatever you like. Don't forget to make it executable; browse to /home/username/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts, right-click the file you just saved, select "properties", go to the 'permissions'-tab and enable the "execute" option for "Owner:". Now you can use this script by right-clicking a file in nautilus, opening the menu "Scripts" and selecting it in the menu. There are more great things to do with nautilus-scripts, like rotating images, opening a terminal 'within' a specific directory, send a file by email, install a software-package etc. I'll talk about this later in a special blog about Nautilus-scripts!

Cheers!

Transparent background

Hello there!

I have a new quick gnome-trick for you. You can set a png with transparencies as your Gnome-background! This means you can have an image on top of a gradient and have the gradient shine trough it. This way, it's easy to create nice effects in some seconds, try it out!

Ok, back to my studydesk now :),

see you.

Nat Friedman about the Bounty Hunt

Nat friedman shows us on his blog some results of the Gnome Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt. I like and use the "Panel clock/calendar integration", "Gaim/addressbook identity integration", "Set wallpaper from mailer", "Attachment bar and drag-and-drop in the composer" etc. This is a nice way to get really great stuff in Gnome. Thanks.

Dragging windows in desktop-switcher

Hi there,

I studied a lot today and allmost forgot to post something; no worry, I'm alive and kicking :p. I get comments on my blog by mail etc from people telling me "I can do that with my non-Gnome desktop environment too". I believe you guys, I just think there are a lot of Gnome users that are not aware of those tricks, and don't use there environment in it's full glory (yet). I'm just not always gonna check if trick X or feature Y is also available on Windows, KDE or OS X; ifso, the users of those environments reading my blog, not knowing those tricks and trying out if it works on their platform too, also will learn something from this blog :).
Anyway, did you know you can drag the miniature-windows in the workspace-switcher applet ? You can't do this if you have the names of your workspaces on it, but who does that if (s)he knows about this possibility ;) ? I you are normal a user like me, I think 4 workspaces is the best solution. One of my worspaces (2) is always filled up by evolution, the last is populated by blam, the first is for normal use (like IM, reading websites etc) and the third is for work :). If I work on a text, Abiword or Gedit fills it up, Gimp for image manipulation, Gnumeric for spreadsheets etc.

The desktop-switcher applet:


See you!

Searching in Nautilus

Some tips about searching for files in specific folders in Nautilus;

As you expect from modern filemanagers, if you type a character on your keyboard, Nautilus jumps to the first file/folder beginning with that charater; but nautilus does more, you can use type-ahead search to search for a specific file/folder if you know it's name, you just have to type quickly enough ;).

You can also search files/folders with a pattern in Nautilus. Pressing Ctrl-S gives you a dialog with 1 input-field. If you type in e.g. *.ogg, it will select all your ogg-files in that directory. I use this feature for example to select all my screenshots I saved temporary on my desktop. I press Ctrl-S on my desktop, type in Screenshot*, press OK, and all my un-renamed screenshots are ready to be dragged to Pictures/Screenshots!

A screenshot showing the Ctrl-S feature: (note I was too lazy to log in with English as language, so you'll learn some Dutch while watching this ;))

Click on the image to see it in full size.

Ciao!

More Metacity magic

Metacity (the Gnome windowmanager) seems to be plenty of great features. I tried to sum all of 'm in my "Gnome windowmanager magic" post but I forgot one and put it in the next post. Today I got a comment from Vincent learning me a new metacity trick. I quote him:
If you move a window in metacity while holding the "shift" key, the window will snap to all the stuff that is on your screen (other windows, panels, screen sides, etc).
Thanks very much!

cheers!

the .hidden trick

Hi there, here's a new tip of the day;

You can hide files/folders from showing up in nautilus by creating a file with the name .hidden in the directory where those files/folders are and adding lines to it with the name of the file/folder you want to hide. This come in handy if you use your home-directory as Desktop directory (you can do this in gconf if you want to) and don't want to see e.g. the Evolution directory.

ciao!

~/Templates

I 'm having exams soon, so I won't be writing big articles for some time, but I'll keep on satisfying you with Gnome tips and tricks you might not know yet!

Do you have a directory called Templates in you home-directory ? If not, create it immediately as this is the place where you can put template files to create Documents with some clicks from your Gnome desktop. If the directory exists and there is minimum 1 file in it, you'll have an extra entry in the menu when you right-click on your desktop in Gnome (version 2.6 or higher). For example, you can create an empty Abiword document and store it as "Abiword document.abw" in ~/Templates so you can right-click on your desktop and select Create document > Abiword document. I did the same with a Gnumeric file, a Gimp-file a plain-text file etc.
You can also create an Abiword file with a header with your name and adress and store it as "Letter template" in ~/Templates to create letters with a click ... there are just so much possibilities :).
And you can create subdirectories too like ~/Templates/Work/Letter.abw or ~/Templates/Blogging/Blog with 1 image and 1 link.txt etc.

Templates in action:

Click on the image to see it in full size.

cheers!

On Footnotes!

My blog was mentioned on Footnotes today. Thank you for the appreciation!

Epiphany - intuitive grasp of reality

(EDIT: I added some info to this post after I got some feedback. Scroll down to the end to read it)

Epiphany ("intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple and striking") is the default browser for Gnome desktops and what better name to have for this great piece of software. It uses gecko - the mozilla render-engine - to draw websites so it's able to view any website Mozilla has no problems with. Epiphany is not a browser like the other ones available as it's really simplistic but still very usable and enjoyable. It has all the features you expect from a modern browser; bookmarks, tabs, popup-clocking, zooming, costumisable toolbars etc. and it is really well integrated with Gnome too; it uses GTK, you can drag 'n drop from/to epiphany in Gnome, it downloads default to the Gnome downloads directory, to view a page's source-code (press Ctrl-U or select View > Page Source) it opens gedit - the gnome text-editor etc.
I think a lot gnome-users don't know the power of Epiphany and thus use another browser, I hope to convice them with this article because epiphany earns more respect then it gets :).
Something very specific about epiphany is it's bookmarks-system. Most browsers store bookmarks like files in directories where you can create subdirectories to order 'm. Epiphany uses a kind of "virtual folders". You can create "topics" and when you add a bookmark you can pick some topics where it belongs to, this way 1 bookmark can belong to 1 or more topic(s). When you want to open a bookmark, you can open the bookmarks menu and click on the title, or just start typing the title of the bookmark in the location bar and - as you type - you can pick the bookmark fromthe dropdown menu. When you start typing the name of a topic in the locationbar, all the bookmarks of that topic will be showed in the dropdown-menu. Ain't this great ?
The behaviour of the tabs in epiphany is nice too. Press Ctrl-T or click on a button on the toolbar you added to add a new tab, press Ctrl-W or click on the little cross on the tab (I like this behaviour much more then the one in e.g. Mozilla Firefox where the cross is not on the tab but on the right side of the tabs-bar) to close a tab, press Alt-[number] to go to the [number]st tab, Ctrl-PageUp and Ctrl-PageDown to scroll through the tabs, or scroll to the tabs with the arrow-keys after selecting a tab by clicking it. You can also drag tabs to other windows or just out of the window to create a new window with the contents of that tab. The hotkeys for these actions can be found in the Tabs-menu!

Epiphany screenshot:

Click the image to open the Epiphany homepage.

Also the mousewheel can be used very intuitive for several tasks, like Alt+scrollwheel to scroll in the browser-history, scrollling above the zoombutton on the toolbar (add this via Edit > Toolbars) or with the Shift button held down makes you zoom in/out on the viewed webpage and Ctrl+scrollwheel makes you scroll per page (like using PageUp/PageDown). [EDIT: Reinout (cfr. last paragraph) told me I forgot to mention the fact that Epiphany scrolls through the tabs when your mousepointer is on a tab, nice example of intuitivity! Thank you!]
Another feature you find in other modern browsers is the type-ahead search. When you want to search something on a website, click in the background of the website and start typing what you're searching for. Epiphany will search-as-you type and select the typed words if it finds them. To jump to the next result, press Ctrl-G, Shift-Ctrl-G to go back to the previous result. This is only for links to other websites. If you want to search this way for the whole text of the website, press '/' first.
A very innovative thing in Epiphany is it's popup-blocker. It doesn't have a heavy interface (only one option in a menu) but it Just Works ! When you don't want popup-windows for a website, block 'm with View > Popup Windows and epiphany will remember this setting again when you visit this website in the future. Nothing more, nothing less and it rocks!
Epiphany also has a build in websearch function (via Google by default*). To search for something on the web, just type the searchwords in the location bar and press enter; if it's not a url it will be searched for on Google*.
Epiphany's also great at remebering passwords. When you enter a password in a form it asks you if it has to save it again. When you save a password, the next time you visit that site it will already be filled in so you only have to click on the confirmation / ok / login - button. To delete this information, go to Edit > Personal Data. Also if you have fill in a lot of forms on a webpage, epiphany will ask to remember them for a next time you visit that website. Isn't this just great ?

Happy Epiphany'ing ! :D

By the way: did I tell you how to change your default browser settings on gnome to epiphany ? Load Applications > Desktop Preferences > Advanced > Preferred Applications and just select epiphany on the first tab.

EDIT: The first comment on this post made me point out I forgot to mention the Epiphany Extensions. Epiphany has a great plugin system and those plugins are called "extensions". They are different from Firefox's extensions, so you can't use those with Epiphany. There exist some nice Extensions for Epiphany though, like mouse-gestures, a sidebar, more options on tabs etc. I also heard from Reinout van Schouwen an addblocker and tab-coloring (to show the state like 'unread' and 'loaded' the same way gaim does it for 'is typing' and 'unread' ) extension will be available soon. The future is bright :).

EDIT: I've got a lot of feedback on this post via the comments on Footnotes, the comments on this blog, an email and some forums where this blog was mentioned. Some people asked why they should choose Epiphany over Firefox. Well, I found something in the epiphany-wiki that might help you making a choice.

Transfered pictures preview in gaim

Fernando Herrera shows his recent work on gaim on his blog. We'll see previews for transfered pictures over the MSN protocol in future gaim. Great work, Fernando!


Click the image to visit Fernando Herrera's blog.

Gnome in the year 2004

Now 2004 is definitely to be considered 'past', it's a great time to look at what the gnome community offered us in the last 12 months. The past year brought us 2 splendid Gnome releases. (As we all know, the Gnome community satisfies us every 6 months with a new version.)
Gnome 2.6 surprised us with a new - I certainly call it new ;) - way of managing our files, called "spatial nautilus". I remember those forums and mailinglists getting spammed by messages like "I could do the same with my Windows-box back in '95" or "y00 suX0r5 goin' back in time", posted by some {mostly other desktop-software using} wacko who read no more then 1 review that was written by an even worse {other-desktop- OR l}user that didn't manage his/her files for more then 2 hours spatially basicly because (s)he couldn't bare it anymore that the hovered files' names weren't underlined! :D Yes, I do exaggerate; my apologies to the hurt souls, and no, I don't want to reanimate any flamewar :). I must confess one of the first things I did after upgrading my Gnome desktop to the new and shiny 2.6-edition was loading the gconf configuration editor and activating the "allways use browser" setting. I wasn't sure about the benefits of spatial browsing and silently hoped that Gnome 2.8 would ship with that option on as default. Time changed and so did I (I think after reading the first review with a positive comment on the spatial metafor) and I *in a melodic mood* "can't stop loving" this more intuitive and quicker way of browsing my filesystem. I promise I'll write an article about "how to use spatial nautilus" soon because I still think there still are some lost Gnome-using souls that didn't see the light yet as you can't use spatial nautilus and keep on thinking the same way about file-management. You really need to order your files another way; More about that later!
Gnome 2.6 also came with a "Computer" icon on the desktop giving us direct acces to our main filesystem, other harddisks, removable media and network-resources; we adore the network-transparency this Gnome release featured and that matured even more in the following Gnome release. 2.6 was also the first version to use the new GTK filechooser that followed the same path as Nautilus, intiutivity and simplicity! The other improvements in Gnome 2.6 were less world-shocking but made are lives simpler; a nifty network-applet, a simpler way to manage background-images, an all-in-one keyboard-shortcuts-settings-dialog, a greatly ameliorated FTP-viewer and a bunch of accesibility improvements.

Spatial Nautilus:

Click on the image to read the Gnome 2.6 release notes.

Gnome 2.8 came on the 15th of september and blinded us with an even more integrated and overall improved desktop environment. Many reviews covered the new mimesystem, but we also enjoy the Apple's RendezVous-like DNS based service-detection that makes our nautilus magically 'see' all the services on our local network, the built-in VNC server/client tools, the Gnome-System-Tools, the other great improvements to the usability and last but not least the Evolution mail/contacts/calender-program becoming a completely integrated part of the Gnome desktop.

The new mimesystem:

Click on the image to read the Gnome 2.8 release notes.
(EDIT: this page explains the new gnome 2.8 stuff in detail)

My "Gnome-tip of the day": to open a location in nautilus with focus on the desktop, press Alt-F2 and type the location, you'll see there's tab-completition! In spatial nautilus you can also get a location input-field by pressing Ctrl-L, have fun! (EDIT: This read "Alt-L" before, thanks vincent for reporting this error.)

Ciao!