Gnome: T.U.X. (The User's eXperience) - Gnome Tips 'n tricks, news and a lot more ...

Playing DVD iso's

2007-03-14T19:08:00.000+01:00

Hi,

I found a nice Media Player (Gnome's media player is called "Totem") feature this week. I had a DVD with a recording of me on national television this week. I copied it to an .iso image file as I have to return the DVD and I don't have any more blank DVD's. Well, it seem like Gnome's media player can play DVD .iso-files as if they were real DVD's. You can open these files with Totem in 2 ways; after opening Totem:

Open the "Movie" menu and choose "Open". Now select the .iso-file.
Drag the .iso-file on the Totem media player

In fact there's a third way, which is a bit more technical. You could "mount" the .iso-file on your filesystem as if it where a real DVD-device and then acces this from Gnome as you would acces a real DVD. Though, to do this you still need to do some dark magic. I filed a bug in Gnome once to make it easy to do this but there's noone working on this as far as I know.

By the way: Gnome 2.18 is born! Happy Gnome'ing!

I like those tiny things

2007-01-29T14:58:00.000+01:00

Hey there,

with only one exam to go I thought I'd quickly write up another post here, as I won't have time after my exams because of my snowboarding trip to Austria, and I had something to share.
I have a 17 inch flatscreen monitor attached to my computer with a resulotion of 1280 by 1024 pixels. When I bought this piece I found it very big, as before I used 2 15 inch CRT screens to have some screen real estate which used all my precious space on my desk.
Well, after being used to this screen, I still don't find it big enough. So, I thought I'd try to make it look bigger by making everything that's displayed smaller :). Here's what I did and how to do it yourself, making your screen look bigger by making Gnome's widgets smaller:

Making Gnome-panels smaller:

Right-click on the panel and choose Properties, there you can set the size parameter.

Making the folders on my desktop and in directories smaller:

Open some folder and open the Edit menu and choose Preferences. On the first tab you can change the standard zoomfactors for iconview and listview. I used 75% for some time but now while writing this I changed it to 50% for both and it seems still very usable for me. Adjust this to your likes.

Making the Gnome menu's smaller in size:

This one's trickier and involves editing a configuration file. Open the .gtkrc-2.0 file (starting with a dot, it's a hidden file) with the text editor (for example, by pressing Alt-F2, entering "gedit ~/.gtkrc-2.0" in the inputfield and choosing Run) and add a new line like this:
gtk-icon-sizes="panel-menu=16,16:gtk-menu=16,16:gtk-button=16,16:gtk-small-toolbar=16,16:gtk-large-toolbar=24,24:gtk-dialog=32,32:gtk-dnd=32,32"
These are the values I use for different widgets, adjust 'm to your likes. You'll have to re-login for all the changes to be done. (PS: I found about this tip on this website)

Making Gnome's fonts smaller

Open System > Preferences > Fonts. The applicationss-fonts you can set there will be used on your gnome panels, in all your gnome application's menu's and buttons etc. The desktop-font is the one that is used for the names of files and folders on your desktop and in all directories. making those smaller results in smaller windows and panels. I set mine now to 6;7;6;7;7, which can sound rather small but it's well doable. See what's best for you!

I might have done more tweaks to make my screen look bigger, but I can't think of any now. I'll add 'm when I remember 'm!

See you!

Even more middle mouse button action

2007-01-15T07:39:00.000+01:00

In my previous post, I told you about how to open bookmarks and history items etc in a new tab by simply clicking on 'm with the middle mouse button. Well, I thought this was so fantastic but I didn't even try it out in other places in Epiphany.
Well, now it seems like it can be used for some other buttons on the toolbar:

Open your homepage on a new tab by middle clicking the Home button
Open the previous page on a new tab by middle clicking the Back button
Open the next page on a new tab by middle clicking the Forward button

I also set up an "Up" button on my toolbar, to go up in the directory hierarchy of a website. This trick works for this button too.
To (re)arrange your toolbar, add new items or delete items, rightclick it and choose "Customize toolbars...". You'll get a Toolbar Editor window which contains all possible items. Now you can just drag items on the toolbar with your mouse. If you want to remove items, drag 'm off the toolbar to the Toolbar Editor window. Have fun tuning your Gnome Webbrowser!

See you.

Middle mousebutton & Gnome's webbrowser

2007-01-11T10:44:00.000+01:00

Some time ago, I blogged about how to enable middle mousebutton clicks on links to open 'm in a new tab in Gnome's webbrowser (Epiphany). Well, I found out that's not the only place in this browser where this middle mouse button comes out handy. In fact, the usage is very consistent. Left mousebutton clicks open items in the current tab, middle mousebutton clicks open them in a new tab.

Examples:

Links on a webpage
A bookmark on your toolbar (btw: to add one, just drag a link to the toolbar)
A bookmark in the bookmarks menu
A bookmark in the bookmarks editor
Any entry in the "dropdown menu" you get when you type something in the adressbar:

A history item
A search command from a smart bookmark
A bookmark

I guess there are even more examples like this. I'm once again proud to be an Gnome user.

See you !

Edit: corrected some spelling mistakes

Reset applications menu

2007-01-05T12:04:00.000+01:00

Hey,

I was playing a bit with the Alacarte menu-editor that is by default installed on my Ubuntu system after some items were added to my menu by wine but I didn't like that submenu wine created. I'm not a big fan of Alacarte as it seemed to have some problems for me, but I guess these will be resolved in the next Ubuntu release. After all, I'm using a "technology preview", 6.10, that is.
To make a long story short, I wanted to revert my menu to the default, the menu a new user would get. After some searching, I found a quick solution; here it is:

You have to remove the file ~/.config/menus/applications.menu which you can do in a lot of different ways (choose one):

Open the "Run" dialog with Alt-F2 and type in (or copy from here): rm ~/.config/menus/applications.menu and choose Run
Open a terminal and enter the same command and press Enter
Open the directory by pressing Ctrl-L after clicking on a filemanager window or your desktop and enter ~/.config/menus/ and choose Open, then delete the applications.menu file

After this, open your Applications menu, and you'll see it was reverted to the default!

See you !

Hide Templates

2007-01-04T11:24:00.000+01:00

Hey,

I found out someone stumbled upon this blog by searching google for hide templates in gnome. I'm not quite sure what this person wanted as I see 2 possibilities:

I want to remove the "Create document >" submenu of Nautilus (the filemanager) in the menu when I rightclick on the desktop or in a window of a folder:

You can do this by removing all templates in the "Templates" folder of your home-directory or by removing this folder.

I don't want to see the "Templates" folder in my home-directory but I want the "Create document >" submenu of Nautilus (the filemanager) in the menu when I rightclick on the desktop or in a window of a folder:

You can do this by hiding this folder. To hide a file or folder, enter it's name on a new line in a file called .hidden (mind the dot) in the directory of the folder; if the file .hidden doesn't exist yet, create it. A file wich name starts with a dot is also a hidden file
If you're new to this, just open the text-editor, type Templates in the document, save it as .hidden in your personal folder (home-directory), and you're done.

Bottomline: there are 2 kinds of hidden files in Gnome, those whose names start with a dot and those whose names are in a .hidden file.

Ciao!

Quickly Create New Launchers

2006-12-31T17:23:00.000+01:00

I found out a quick way to create a new launcher for a program, be it on the desktop or on a panel. If you have a launcher already in a menu, you know you can just drag it to the desktop or on a panel. But, if you don't have such a menu entry yet, this is a quick way:

Press Alt-F2 so you get the "Run..." dialog.
Now, type in the name of your application (I mean the command to run it, not the name as it appears in menu's etc), which will autocomplete?
Then drag the icon on the left of it - which changes in the app's icon if it's known - on your desktop or panel.

You just created a new launcher for that specific application! If you want to you can change it's settings (like the icon to be shown) by right-clicking it and choosing "Properties".

Happy New Year and much fun with Gnome in 2007 !

Add to Totem's playlist

2006-10-14T12:26:00.000+02:00

Heya,

Like a year ago, I used to use Totem as a music playback application in the first place. I dropped some directories with mp3's on it, put on my wireless headphones and went outside. But, since I became a fulltime Banshee user, things changed. For instance, I don't have Totem's playlist pane open anymore by default. Now, sometimes I find an mp3 on my harddrive I didn't know I still had with some obscure name and the Nautilus preview sounds good. Then, I just click it to open it in Totem. Well, If I find more of those at once, I feel the need to queue some songs again I don't want to add to my Banshee library (yet). Plus, I don't want to have the playlist opened, as it uses too much screen real-estate for these 10 minutes. Now I found a great solution. You don't have to drop songs on the playlist field to queue 'm up. You can just drop 'm on the "Show playlist" button too! Thanks alot, Totem dev's !

Ciao!

Gnome 2.14 and beyond - Deskbar trick

2006-07-31T12:14:00.000+02:00

Guess who's back ... back again ? As I stopped contributing to the aMSN project (creating a multi-platform MSN Messenger client with loads of features), I might find some time to blog again over here. The last time I was here I was talking about goodness we could expect for the Gnome 2.12 release; well, now most of us are already using 2.14 and the 2.16 release is coming close. In other words: I've been off for some time but I'm back in business, willing to serve you some news, insights and tips 'n tricks about gnome from a user's point of view.

For those who are not yet using 2.14, or just those who want to know what's new and hot in 2.14, you can check Davyd Madeley's list of new features, or visit the official Gnome 2.14 homepage. As I'm a Ubuntu 'edgy' (developement releases) user, I'm already using a Gnome 2.15 release (the developement version that will become 2.16 once stable); and I must say there's already some great 2.16 stuff on my desktop.

One of the greatest new things in Gnome 2.14 is the Deskbar applet. With the beagle backend enabled, this swiss-army-knife applet can be seen as a mix between apple's Spotlight, an application starter like Quicksilver, Google Desktop Search etc. When you place it on your panel you can choose to have it shown as an input-field or a button, which when pressed, shows the input field. Once you start typing something, all kinds of actions and search results will be thrown at you.

Now, here's a nice trick you can do with one of the latest the Deskbar-versions; In the preferences screen, check the option to have Deskbar search for your current selection when you press the chosen hotkey (the default is Alt-F3). Now, imaging you have to e-mail someone and you just found her or his e-mail address online. Just select the address, press the hotkey and choose the "Send Email to name@domain.com" and the Evolution "New mail" window will be opened for you with the address already filled in. Have fun !

Quick theme changing

2005-07-31T10:30:00.000+02:00

Marek Jurman told me about this quick way to change themes; In a nautilus location bar (press Ctrl-L to get one), type in "themes:///" (without the quote-signs off course) and press enter. A nautilus window will open (like a folder) with icons (thumbnails) for every theme on your system. Just click one to quickly apply a theme.
When you want to tweak the theme further, you have to open the theme dialog (where you can also change themes) by System > Preferences > Theme. In this window you can change window borders, window element styles and icons separately.

Have fun!

"A Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12"

2005-07-31T10:22:00.000+02:00

As Ed Crypt already noted in a comment on an earlier post about Gnome 2.12 features, Davyd Madeley did it again. Davyd Created a nice page with a list of most of the new Gnome 2.12 features (you can see in the UI). As he states in his blog post, it's even not done yet, so we can expect even more from the new Gnome.
There are a lot of new, exciting and enhanced things in the upcoming Gnome and I can't wait to have my hands on it. I think I'm gonna try out Ubuntu Breezy.

Ciao.

No icons on desktop

2005-07-07T14:41:00.000+02:00

Hey,

I found out someone came on my blog by searching google for "hide gnome 2.10 desktop icons". Well, in fact this is really easy to disable;
Open Gnome's Configuration Editor (gconf-editor; Applications > System Tools > Configuration Editor), browse through the tree to /apps/nautilus/preferences and uncheck the 'show_desktop' option. Now you're in there you can tweak a lot more, but be carefull ;)!

Cheers!

Gnome 2.12 Sneak Peek

2005-07-07T14:19:00.000+02:00

Hey,

I stumbled upon this page on the gnome-wiki which seems to be a draft for the Gnome 2.12 release notes. Check it out to see some great new things and enhancements we'll see in 2.12!

Ciao.

BTW: I went to Strasbourg to protest against software-patents and the Law was rejected! Thanks to all the people protesting at several occasions, contacting their MEP's etc.

Epiphany problem: right / middle click

2005-07-02T13:36:00.000+02:00

Heya,

I reïnstalled my desktop-box again :). But, I was so stupid to use the first Ubuntu CD I could find laying around on my desk, which happened to be a warty one. And as I was to lazy to reinstall it again ("I was too busy" would have been a lie ;)) I thought I'd just upgrade the packages I really use to hoary for now and do this till breezy comes out within some months. (Maybe I won't be able to wait and reinstall it with the right CD if I run into troubles with it.)
Anyway; I got the following problem: Clicking the right or middle mousebutton on links in Epiphany just didn't do anything. I visited the #epiphany IRC-channel (on irc.gnome.org), and asked if this was a known problem (hereby I'd like to apoligize for being to lazy to first check the FAQ :|).
So the problem was I upgraded epiphany but I didn't upgrade my firefox-package (epiphany depends on the firefox package for the gecko html renderer). After upgrading it the problem was gone!

See you!

Special K

2005-06-24T18:33:00.000+02:00

Hi,

I never intended to write this as it involves some politiks and prakmatism, but yeah, this is a small post about KDE :). At first I'd like to say I don't like the black-white Kold-war-like thinking of "I like this thus I hate the others". So, I don't hate KDE at all, I just use Knome as it feels better for me.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is I just stumbled upon this page. It's some kind of sneak-peek website for KDE-stuff, to show off what's already in the kode for the neKst release. So, what do we learn ? KDE is 'kopying' (not in some bad sence of the word) some knome features. I'll link some skreenshots so I don't have to eksplain a lot:

The 'minipager' (desktop switcher):

Adding applets to Kicker (we call it a 'panel'):

Konqueror (web browser) is able to load google maps:

The future is bright for KDE too. Kongratulations ;) !

Tab manipulation

2005-06-24T11:03:00.000+02:00

Hey,

In a lot of basic gnome applications, tabs are used to reduce screenclutter. You can have tabbed chatwindows in gaim, tabbed browsing in epiphany, tabbed text editing in gedit ... What is so cool about this in gnome is that you can manipulate them easily with your mouse. Click a tab to activate, click it's close-button to ... close, scroll your mousewheel hovering the tabs to scroll though the tabs, drag the tabs to any place on the tabbar you want ...
What is even cooler is that you can drag tabs out of the window to create a new window with it's content. Also you can drag tabs from an application-window to other windows of that application ... you love it or you love it, right ?

Marek Jurman kindly asked me to blog about this. Thanks for the inspiration!

Another backgrounds tip

2005-06-20T09:24:00.000+02:00

I already blogged about how to do cool things with desktop background not to long ago. I told you that you can easily set backgrounds by dragging 'm to the backgrounds-properties window. Well, you even don't have to do that most of the time. If you just want the default options, drag an image on the desktop with your middle mouse-button down. When you release the button, you'll get a menu where you can choose "set as background". Note: you can also do this to set backgrounds for folder-windows in Nautilus.
You can also set background-colors or -patterns by just dragging 'm to the desktop or any folder-window, gnome-terminal-window, panel ...
Another background-tip: in Epiphany, you can right-click images and set 'm as background from the context-menu, which will open the background-properties window so you can set it up easily.

Command line applet

2005-06-19T11:18:00.000+02:00

Hey,

This is one for those who are used to the commandline but want to forget about it, for example, to get rid of the geekish linux user stigma ;). Especially if you only use the terminal to run programs/scripts you have no starter for on your desktop/panel or in your menus. To add this applet to your panel, like for all panel applets, right-click a panel and choose "Add to panel...":

(click to get the full size image)

Then you get this well-known "Add to panel" window:

(click to get the full size image)

Search through list till you find the "Command line" (or whatever it is in your language ;)) applet. To quickly find it, you can just click some entry and begin typing the name of it. Btw: you can do this in most 'lists' in gnome! When you found the applet you need (the command line one for this example ;)) you can double click it to add it on the place where you right-clicked, or just drag it to any place on the panel where you like it :). This is how it looks:

(click to get the full size image)

When you type and just hit return, the command gets run as it were run on a terminal. If you click the dot, you can choose a file on your filesystem to execute, the down-arrow shows you a history of your last-used commands.
But, we're not done yet! This applet is a lot more powerfull then just to execute some commands. Let's open the preferences dialog (by right-clicking the applet and choosing "preferences - obvious, right ? ;)):

(click to get the full size image)

As you see, you can enable history-based auto-completition, which is very cool as it makes you not have to retype the whole thing you run ... this seems stupid for commands you run regulary as it would be a lot easier to just provide a starter for them, but ...
On the second tab of the preferences-screen you can set "macros". I cannot explain this very well in English, but it just means you can do a lot more then just running normal commands with this nifty applet. There where some macros set by default, for example, one that opens your browser with a google search if you type "google: ". Another cool one just makes your browser open a url you type (paste ;)) in the applet. It's easy to add new macros. For example, to search in the archives of this blog, add a macro with the pattern "^gt: *(.*)$" and command "gnome-open http://www.google.com/custom?domains=&q=\1&domains=gnometux.blogspot.com
&sitesearch=gnometux.blogspot.com&client=pub-4058752637362479&forid=1
&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&cof=GALT%3A%235588AA%3BGL%3A1%3BDIV
%3A%23EEEEEE%3BVLC%3A996699%3BAH%3Acenter%3BBGC%3AFFFFFF%3BL
BGC%3AFFFFFF%3BALC%3ACC6600%3BLC%3ACC6600%3BT%3A333333%3BGF
NT%3A5588AA%3BGIMP%3A5588AA%3BLH%3A100%3BLW%3A800%3BL%3Ahttp
%3A%2F%2Fstudent.vub.ac.be%2F%257Ekmdemeye%2Fblog%2Flogo.jpg%3BS%3
Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgnometux.blogspot.com%3BFORID%3A1%3B&hl=en" (all this on one line and both without the quote-marks). Then, you can just type "gt: gnome" to search for the word 'gnome' in my archives :).

Cyah !

Quick screenshotting

2005-06-15T17:45:00.000+02:00

Time for a new trick ! I'm gonna tell a bit about making screenshots in Gnome. For those who don't know what a 'screenshot' is, it's a kind of 'photograph' you make of your screen. In fact, it's just saving what's currently on your screen in an image.
So, how to make those screenshots within Gnome ? Well, there are several ways to do this. You can use some 3th party program that creates screenshots (for example in The Gimp with File > Import > Screenshot) or a commandline-program ... but that's not what were gonna do, as Gnome has a screenshot-utility built-in! To call this program, you can press a shortcut-keycombination or open the System-menu and click the "Take Screenshot" entry. Both will bring up this dialog:

You can choose a filename and folder where it should be saved. Well, the cool thing is you don't have to really save this screenshot if you just want to send it to somebody. Which is cool as mostly when you want to show something to somebody you remove the saved screenshot afterwards. So, how to do it? Right, just drag the thing. You can drag the screenshot out of the dialog, to a gaim-conversation or on a gaim-contact to send it to him/her, on gaim to set your own buddy-image (aka 'avatar'), to the evolution "new mail" attachement zone, on your panel to use it as background (not that I guess you want that, but it's possible ;)) ... or just to any directory in nautilus to save it over there!
To create screenshots with key-shortcuts, you have 2 combinations to set. One to create a screenshot of the whole screen and one to only capture the active window. You can set both shortcuts in the "Keyboard shortcuts" preferences window (open it with System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts).

Have fun screenshotting !

Sendto-applet

2005-06-10T20:37:00.000+02:00

Hey!

I had this idea last night when I tried to sleep but failed; You know about the Nautilus SendTo-extension, right? No ? You should, I already blogged about it ;).
Anyway, Reinout commented on it saying it's another addition to Nautilus' context-menu. I also thought about this disadvantage and came up with following 'solution';
What about a "Gnome SendTo applet" ? It would be a place on the panel where you can drop files and it opens the SendTo dialog-window and off you go. I also think the Gnome HIG says a user should "perform tasks" (like dragging files to manipulate 'm) instead of using context-menu's/commands (cfr for example: Provide Direct Manipulation). For the appet I had the following in mind: an open box with a stamp on it. For the user it would be like "put some stuff in a box to send it". Maybe it would even be better/cooler to have an opened box where you can drag stuff in and then when you click the box, it closes and shows the SendTo window ? Maybe this could make sending 1 file quickly too complex (2 clicks to show the dialog and then some more for the sending) ? A maybe-somewhat-silly-and-not-very-informational mockup:

Another thing I had in mind is doing somewhat the same with the Contact-Lookup-Applet. Right now when you find a contact and click it you get a dialog with emailadresses and IM-IDs if you have gaim well set up etc. So, what I thought about, was making it possible to drag files on the icon in front of the emailadresses/IM-IDs over there. So now there is for emails just a "email" icon, when you drag a file on it it could have a paperclip on it to make it visible there will be something attached automatically to the mail ...
I'm gonna try to reach some developpers of Gnome to see if they find it a good ID and if someone wants to implement it. I hope I'll be able to blog about it again later on !

Ciao

Epiphany load current selection

2005-06-07T17:06:00.000+02:00

Hi!

When I converted from Debian to Ubuntu, I lost Epiphany's "click middle-mousebutton on window to load the URL or keyword search for what's currently in your clipboard" feature. I searched in the about:config, but couldn't find it. Today I took a quick look in gconf, and there I found it! To have this option (which seems off by default - I guess to not scare users that are not aware of it), click the checkbox of the /apps/epiphany/general/middle_click_open_url key.

Ciao !

Burn baby burn ...

2005-05-04T17:41:00.000+02:00

Heya,

Long time ago, right? I didn't have much time actually. My first year Bachelor in Criminologic Sciences is running at it's end, so we have a lot of work and exams are coming near. But, as anti-stress measure between studying, I'm gonna tell you a bit about Nautilus Burner.
What is Nautilus Burner ? It's a Nautilus (Gnome's filemanager - the program that draws those icons on your desktop and creates the windows with all your files inside) extension that allows you to burn CDs and DVDs very easily. I mean, very easy !

Open the Nautilus Burner 'place' window. You can do this easily by opening a random Nautilus window, clicking on the "Places" menu and choosing "CD/DVD creator":
Drag the files you want to burn to your CD/DVD in this window (they will be 'copied' by default, so there's no need to press CTRL to have 'm copied instead of moved ;)):
When you've dragged all needed files to the window, click on the "File" menu and select "Write to disc":
Then you get this dialog:

First you choose the device you want to write with, you give the CD a name, choose wether or not you want the device to eject the disc after writing and if you want to write another CD with this data and then you click the "Write" button. That's all ! I said it was easy, right ? :)

Nautilus Burner also let you easily burn ISO-files (CD 'images'). Just right-click the file, choose "Write to CD" and the burn-dialog appears, have fun!

Here's a cool trick I found in a gnome-journal article:

To create an autorun script, create a plain text file named “autorun”, something like this:

#!/bin/sh
dir=$(echo $0 |sed 's/autorun//')
cd $dir
fullpath=$(pwd)
exec /usr/bin/nautilus $fullpath

To make it executable, right click on the autorun script and set it to executable.

Drag it into the burn window with the rest of your files. Now, when the CD/DVD is inserted a new nautilus window will open and browse the CD/DVD.

See you !

More about Epiphany

2005-04-23T13:48:00.000+02:00

Hello !

I blogged about the goods of Epiphany before, but there's a lot more to tell about my favorite webbrowser! For example, most people don't know about the power of it's simplistic but "Just Working" popup-blocker. By default all (normal) pop-up windows are blocked. When you surf to a website that opens a pop-up window, epiphany will block it and show an icon in the status-bar to notify you about it. If you want the popups to show up, you just have to open the "View" menu and select the "Pop-up windows" entry. The window(s) will pop up without you having to reload the page, and, it will remember you want to allow popups for this page. So the next time you visit that website, the pop-up windows won't be blocked!
Another thing I just have to mention is the "epiphany extensions" package. When you install this, you have a load of plugins for epiphany you can load/unload with Extra > Extensions. One of my favourites is the mousegestures extension. This kind of functions can also be found in Firefox extensions or the Opera browser. When you load this plugin, you can close tabs/windows easily by drawing an 'L' while the middle mousebutton is pressed, you can switch tabs by dragging the mouse up and then to the left or right with the middle-button down, go to fullscreen-mode by dragging it down and then left, creating a new tab with up-left-down and view a page's source-code with up-right-down. Those are the ones I used, if you know about more gestures, don't hesitate to share 'm with us.
Another great extension, the "search" extension, makes type-ahead searches work the same way as they are in Mozilla Firefox. It adds a bar just above the status-bar where you can easily press 'next'/'previous' to search in the page etc. By default epiphany only searches in links on a webpage when you type-ahead-search. If you want to search in all the text on a page, press '/' before typing your search.
There are a lot more extensions, most are self-explanatory, have fun with 'm !

See you!

Edit: I forgot to tell about these mouse-gestures: hold down your middle-mousebutton and just mouse your mouse up (far enough) and you'll create a new window .. the same you do with moving your mouse down and you'll create a new tab. Enjoy!
Edit2: Thanks reinouts who gave me the idea to blog about the pop-up-blocker

I need you, you, you ...

2005-04-23T01:07:00.000+02:00

Heya,

Party with me, we are now on Planet Gnome-NL! This doesn't mean I'm going to blog in Dutch although it would make life easier for me and this blog gramatically much better ;). I created a 'hakergotchi' for a better presence on the planet-page, but my gimp-skills are even worse then my English ... so, if you are a graphics artist and you have a great idea for a design, you can mail me ;), I'd be very thankfull!
If you checked my last post you could have had some problems with the screenshot, that is because it's hosted on a free hosting service I found as the space I get from my universityis rather limited and thus allways full. Though, this free hosting thing I found does not seem a good solution. If you know any good free hosting service without adds (I am willing to add a link to it in the "Supported links" section of this site), please mail me :).
I didn't have a lot of spare time to blog anyomre and this won't change in the near future, I fear. Therefor, if someone who experiences the same fun with gnome as I do is willing to contribute to this blog, you know my e-mail addres ;).

Ciao!

Desktop Background tips

2005-04-22T14:41:00.000+02:00

Hi,

I changed my desktop background yesterday, and thought you may be interested in this trick I used. See, when you set a background you know you can choose to set a picture (you can have it in the middle of your screen, strecht it to fill your screen, have tiles ...) or set a gradient of 2 colo(u)rs (horizontally or vertically). But, did you know you can use a (semi-)transparant image and have the gradient shine trough it ? Maybe you did, if not, you'll have a lot of fun trying it out ;).

Here's a screenshot of my desktop:

(Click for the full sized-image.)

Now, I'll quickly explain how I set this up;

First, find some cool backgroundpicture. I found this great photo of a beautiful girl on the website of RubenV, someone I know from Gnome-NL. As I only wanted that girl on my desktop, I cut her out of the image using The Gimp as following;
I created a new canvas (File > New) with the dimensions of my desktop (which is the screen resolution) and a transparant background. Then I dragged the image I wanted to use from Nautilus on the canvas, right-clicked it to make the newly created layer as big as the image (Layer > To image-size), selected everything on the layer (Ctrl-A) and dragged it to the bottom right of the canvas as I want the girl over there on my desktop (tip: you can quickly zoom in/out on the canvas with the mousewheel, holding down the 'Shift' button, and scroll it horizontally pressing the 'Ctrl' button).
Then I picked the "free selection" tool (third tool-button). I set it up to use the first mode (create a new selection) and to use "Feather edges" with radius 100 (maximal). To change the settings, double-click the tool-button.
Then I selected the girl leaving enough space around her. Then I inverted the selection with Ctrl-I, removed the selection with Ctrl-X and saved hte result as a PNG-file.
Then I opened the Background-Properties dialog window, and dragged the file into it, set up some colors for the gradient ... and enjoyed the result. This all took me less then 2 minutes, and I'm sure that if I had some skills in Gimp'ing, it even would have been less :).

Ciao.

Gnome 2.10.1

2005-04-19T15:35:00.000+02:00

Heya,

The first bugfix release in the 2.10.x series of the gnome desktop is available. Ok, this news is a day or 2 late for those using Ubuntu hoary/breezy, but I just wanted to post something to make sure "y'all know this blog ain't dead" (damn I sound kinda 'gangsta' ... it's not on purpose though). It's been a while since I posted my last entry but I've been very busy. I hope I'll soon have some more spare time again to blog about cool things in Gnome;

Gnome 2.10.1 come with a lot of fixes and updated translations etc, you can check it here.

Cheers!

Easter eggs

2005-03-29T15:22:00.000+02:00

I thought this is just the right time of the year to search for "easter eggs" in gnome. So, I began searching google, asking the kind people of gnome-nl, trying to remember what I found out some time ago when I did the same research and found ... not really much. Though, I found some; Here they are:

Right click on the panel, click 'Panel info'. A dialog pops up. Now press three times the F key and you'll get Wanda the fish swimming on your desktop, above all the other windows! When you click the fish, it will respond by quickly swimming of your screen ... but she will return ;). It's kind of fun, but after a while it gets irritating :). To get rid of the fish, kill your gnome-panel. No worries, it will restart automatically.
There's another trick that does just the same thing (bringing wanda on your desk). Open the "Run ..." dialog (press Alt-F2), and type "free the fish" (without quotation marks) in the input field and press enter. There shee is again.
The run dialog is like the best place for easter eggs, so there's another one; type "gegls from outer space" in the dialog and press enter. An "Invaders" clone game will pop up on your screen and you can play it by moving wanda the fish with the arrows on your keyboard and shooting with the space button. It's not that easy; In the second level another wanda will become one of your enemies. Beware: it can be quite addictive :).

That's all, I couldn't find more of 'm :(. There where some nice things in Evolution before it became 2.x, like when you typed "why?" in the To: field when composing an e-mail etc, but they all seem to be gone (or replaced by others ?). If you know about more Gnome easter eggs, share them with us (post it as a comment ;) )!

Happy Easter !

BTW: Did you know you can create starters by dragging the icon of the application out of the "Run ..." dialog ? This is really handy :)!

BTW.2: I also read about some GDM (Gnome Display Manager) Easter Eggs, but I'm to lazy to try 'm out now, and it's not really gnome anyway ;). Google for 'm !

Nautilus Send-To

2005-03-17T11:05:00.000+01:00

Michael Rhodes send me an e-mail some time ago asking to blog about "Nautilus Send To", a Nautilus-extension that makes it possible to send files per email or instant message with some clicks. I recently 'upgraded' my debian system to an Ubuntu 'hoary' and all I had to do to try this out was running the Synaptic package manager, click on "nautilus-sendto" and "apply" and I had this extra entry in Nautilus' context-menu:

When you click this menu item you get following dialog-window:

You can choose to send as "Instant Message (Gaim)", or as "Email (Evolution)". If you choose to send via IM, you can select one of your logged-in contacts in the combobox below. If you choose to send it via email you can type a contact in an entry-field that will appear and which does type-ahead search in you evolution-adressbook. Well, an image says more:

When you have more then one file selected, you should choose how to pack them. I can choose between .zip, .tar.gz and .tar.bz2, but I guess this depends on what tools you have installed.
Then you just have to click "send" and the archive will be made and send by IM or attached to an email message. Before I forget it, to make it possible to send with gaim, you should load the plugin for gaim this extension ships. Open Gaim's preferences screen, and select the "Nautilus integration" plugin.

See you !

Drag 'n drop Gnometris background

2005-03-12T11:29:00.000+01:00

I found this one on Gnome Hacks; You can set a background for the Gnometris tetris game by drag 'n drop'ing an image or a color to it's window. If the image is small it will be repeated, if big enough it will be scaled to fit in the window. You can also drag colors from The Gimp or Nautilus' Backgrounds and Colors window. Nice trick !

Example:

Btw: this Belgian babe is called Evy Gruyaert

Another cool thing you can do is changing the blocks' style. Open one of the *.png you can find in /usr/share/pixmaps/gnometris/ and save it with an other name in the same directory. Then, restart Gnometris and you can select your own theme in the bottom of the options screen.

Cheers!

Free software iTunes interface

2005-03-12T04:23:00.000+01:00

Apple still restricts the iTunes software to Windows and Mac platforms but now the music store is opened op for other operating systems thanks to pyMusiqe, which offers a GTK2 interface and the option for a song preview using gstreamer. You can also create an account with the software and redownload previously purchased songs.

Ubuntu packages are already available.

Click the image to see it full-size.

I'm curious how Apple will react on this, they seem to be a little bit too much into sueing lately.

Nero for Linux

2005-03-12T03:19:00.000+01:00

While writing my last post about disk burning in Gnome, I expressed some of my expectations about the development of cd burning applications, but the last thing I expected was a Linux port of the famous Nero CD burning suite Nero, which is exactly what happened.

Just to disapoint you after this good news:
No, it's not free software (You need a Nero 6.5 Licence Key)
No, it's not GTK2, it GTK1 (based on GnomeToaster from what I've heard)
No, it does not have all the features of its Windows equivalent

Be sure to check out their website and the screenshot gallery though.

I didn't test the software myself, but I'll definitely keep track of it and inform you about its development.

Gnome 2.10 - There's my baby

2005-03-10T12:22:00.000+01:00

Hi!

It's been a while since my last post, but I'm back in business! There are a lot of reasons why I've not been blogging for so long, but the main reason; I was very busy.

So, yesterday was the day we all were waiting for, the birth of Gnome 2.10. This new version of the desktop we all love focuses on more integration of desktop applications and ships with some 'new' nice applications like Totem (which most of us were already using though), Sound Juicer (an Audio CD "ripper") etc. It seems like a lot of attention went to the panel applets. Most applets were updated and they now become transparent if you your panel is so. The smallband users among us can enjoy the improved Modem applet which integrates nicely with the new Gnome System Tools, but we all will enjoy the trash-on-panel (so you don't have to push the "show desktop" button to hide all your windows before you can drag something to the trash), the device-mount-applet (which shows all you currently (automagically) mounted devices and devices that can be mounted so you don't have to search for their icons on the desktop no more), the improved "sticky notes" applet etc.

Gnome 2.10 also comes with improved network capabilities. When you fire up the new GnomeMeeting, you can have it search on your local network without having to type user information. The same goes on for some of the (grafically) improved Gnome games!

What certainly interests us all; Nautilus became faster. There's still room for a lot of improvement I think, but it certainly is heading the right way! The path button (in the left lower corner of the spatial windows) was made more obviously a button, so new users will quickly find their way to it ;). Nautilus is also more integrated with the panel menu as their is now also a "Places" menu which you can use to quickly navigate to your partitions, home folder, trash, templates folder, favorites, network browser ... We now have 3 menu's, one for "places" one called "Desktop" where you can change yourt dekstop preferences, log out etc. and the good old "Applications" menu which now is a lot lighter. The menu system also changed under the hood so it now uses the Freedesktop.org specifications.

I'm not yet aware of other new killer features in this new Gnome version, but I'm sure I'll find them by using this baby and I'll report them here :).

greetings,

Karel.

CD & DVD burning in GNOME

2005-02-05T17:53:00.000+01:00

If you want to create an audio CD from some ogg files in GNOME these days, you have several choices:

You can fire up a terminal and mess around with oggdec and cdrecord
You can use some really scary looking GTK1 application which hasn't been developed for some years
You can use K3b, which is great feature-wise, but destroys your nice & sleek Gnome Desktop

Neither of these options seems to be appropriate nowadays, so it's nice to see that there's something going on to adress these problems.

Right now, there are three CD Burning apps waiting for you, two of them more usable than the third, but all worth a look.

GnomeBaker seems to be the most advanced candidate right now. It supports data DVD & CD burning, Audio CD burning, CD multisession and and it integrates well into Gnome; interesing features like Video CD creation and Mixed Mode CDs are in the make
Graveman current features are very similar to the ones of GnomeBaker, at least regarding CD burning. DVD buring is currently not supported. Also, some people might find the wizard-like interface rather 'un-gnomish', others might prefer it.
Coaster is currently the least useful of the three. It supports data CD/DVD burning, which can already be done with nautilus-burn. What makes it interesting however, is the fact that it doesn't use cdrecord, like the two tools previous mentioned, but a new library called 'libburn'. This might turn out as an advantage over the other candidates, because cdrecord is known to cause some problems with certain configurations, and sometimes a bit picky about kernel versions and optical drives.

If you are interested in updates on these apps, please leave a comment.

Subtitles in Totem

2005-02-02T15:19:00.000+01:00

Heya!

My exams are over and I passed them all, hooray! So I thought: time to watch some movies and relax. I browsed my network beginning at the computer-icon I put in my gnome-panel (which is an application launcher launching "nautilus --no-desktop computer:///" - I put this on my panel after removing the computer icon from my desktop with gconf). I came across one of my brother's SMB movie-shares, right-clicked on the share, chose "connect to server" and the share was on my desktop. I opened the directory and clicked on "Monty python's The Meaning Of Live.avi". The movie started but I wanted the Dutch subtitle which was also in that same share to be shown. This really is easy; Just change the name of the subtitle-file to the same name as the movie but with a .srt extension and totem loads it automagically. Doing this in gnome is even easier/quicker then on any other desktop I know. select the movie-file, press F2, the name of the file without the extension will be selected. Press Ctrl-C to copy the text, select the name of the subtitle (which normally ends in .srt), press F2 to select the name, press Ctrl-V to paste the name of the movie, press enter and you'r done!
So, the movie started and I layed down on my bed to watch it, but from that distance I couldn't read the text very well :|. Next step: enlarging the font of the subtitles; After asking around on #gnome-nl (the IRC channel of the friendly Dutch-Flemish gnome community), I found the totem-configuration file in ~/.gnome2/totem_config. Open this file ith gedit, let it search for "size" and you'll find this lines:

# subtitle size

# { tiny  small  normal  large  very large  huge }, default: 1

subtitles.separate.subtitle_size:large

There was a # before that last line and the 'large' was 'small' before. I changed it and now I can enjoy the movie ! So what am I waiting for ?

bye!

PS: here's the proof:

Login idea

2005-01-28T14:05:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-28T10:01:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-24T17:02:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-21T15:42:00.000+01:00

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?

2005-01-21T14:02:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-20T00:30:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-17T19:33:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-17T11:34:00.000+01:00

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 ...

2005-01-17T08:05:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-15T10:48:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-14T11:11:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-14T11:02:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-13T20:47:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-13T17:50:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-12T14:39:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-12T13:13:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-12T08:39:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-11T14:14:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-10T15:59:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-09T16:02:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-07T20:25:00.001+01:00

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

2005-01-06T10:27:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-05T20:56:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-05T13:31:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-04T16:12:00.000+01:00

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!

2005-01-03T16:58:00.000+01:00

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

Epiphany - intuitive grasp of reality

2005-01-03T15:15:00.000+01:00

(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

2005-01-03T11:25:00.000+01:00

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

2005-01-02T10:39:00.000+01:00

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!

Gaim: Under the hood

2004-12-29T23:06:00.000+01:00

Gaim 1.1.1, the first palindromic version of Gaim since 1.0.1 (I quote the gaim website), has been spotted on the net lately. What's new ? For my interest: some MSN-bugs were squased, but most important: I can send files again by drag'n'drop! Hooray for boobies .. err for the gaim developers :)! This is one of my favourite gaim-features, and I was in agony when it dissapeared in gaim 1.1.0. But, it's not the only feature that makes me a gaim-lover (although I create some skins and did a tiny little bit of coding for aMSN, the platform-independent MSN Messenger clone written in tcl/tk); let's take a closer look.
First, a screenshot of the contactlist (or 'buddylist') window:

Click on the image to get the full-size version.

Here you see the difference between the 2 contact list 'modes' you can set up with gaim. I prefer and use the 'big' upper one, some people like the minimalistic version more. What's nice about the 'big' version is that there's more information on the buddylist. You get the nickname or alias you set for it, underneath it the status/statusmessage/away_information depending of the protocol this contact is using, and alligned at the right of the buddy, you get his/her 'buddy-picture' (some call it 'avatar'). One thing that annoys me a bit using gaim is you can't see your own status in the main window as it's possible with most IM clients. As a work-around, I added myself as a buddy to my contactlist, in a new group called "My status:", wich I dragged on top of the list. I like the gaim interface because of it's simplicity and it's "just working".

Gaim is (one of) the most intuitive IM client(s) I ever heard of as you can do so much by drag 'n drop or a some mouseclicking. Like when you want to send a file to someone, just drop it on the contact's name on the buddylist, or anywhere in the chatwindow! To set up a buddy-picture, go to the account-editor, click on "edit" after selecting the desired account and drag an image inside the dialog, could it be easier or more intuitive ? It would be nice though to be able o just doubleclick on an account in the acount-editor for editing, I'll request that when I'm in bugreporting-spree again :). Next; to invite people to a chat, click on the invite button and drag the contact from your list in the dialog. This is intuitive, but I suggest it could be even more intuitive if you were able to drag this contact into the chatwindow, another feature request I'll make soon :). The interface of gaim's chatwindows is slick too, it simple but costumizable.

Another great feature is one you find in other modern multi-protocol IM clients, the ability to 'expand' the contacts on your list and drop other contacts in it. E.g. if you have a friend who is online on both MSN and AIM, you can right-click the AIM contact and drag the MSN-one inside the container, and it will seem like 1 contact on your list. If your friend come online only on AIM, you'll see the aim one, the same for MSN. What's nice about this in gaim, is that if you're chatting with that contact on AIM, and he falls offline with it, it automagically sends the next message over MSN! you can also choose on top of the chatwindows "Send as ... {your different accounts here}".
Screenshot of the "expand"-feature:

Click on the image to get the full-size version.

Hail to the gaim-developers for this wonderfull piece of software!
I know gaim is not a part - yet- of the gnome desktop, but its damn well integrated with it;
* using gtk, it has the same look 'n feel as the other gnome-software
* you're able to drag files to send 'm to your gaim contacts
* synchronisation with evolution contactbook* the gnome-panel contact-lookup applet
* some more features I can't think of right now :)
This synchronisation with evolution, which has been a part of gnome since version 2.8, means you can store your gaim-contact data into the evolution address book and use it from evolution and vice-versa.
The contact-lookup applet also uses this information for doing searches. It's an applet you can add to your gnome-panel with an input field. When you type in this field, it does live searches for/on contacts in the evolution addressbook. When you select one of the found contacts you can send him/her an e-mail, an instant message or a gnomemeeting-invitation (I think this is for gnome 2.10, didn't try it out yet).
That's all about gaim for now, this post is already longer then I planned :)

Oh! One more thingie, I forgot a gnome-window-manager trick in my previous post;
press with the middle-mousebutton on a window's titlebar and you'll place it behind the other windows. This is really great if you're doing some work and you want to pause it to take a quick look at your windows behind it, instead of minimizing it or moving it, just middle-click it to the background ;).

EDIT: Another allmost-forgotten Metacity-trick; when you double-click the titlebar the default behaviour is "rolling up"the window, this means hiding everything except the titlebar. You can change this behaviour to the one used on e.g. Microsoft Windows - (un)maximising the window instead of rolling up - by navigation to Applications>Desktop preferences > Windows (in the gnome menu's) and picking the wanted option in the selection-box.

cheers!

Gnome Windowmanager magic

2004-12-29T19:27:00.000+01:00

Hiho - time for some tricks !

If you never used Gnome before, you could ask yourself, why the ... err ... 'heck' is that gnome-thing so much better then the desktop I'm using right now? Well, that's what this blog is all about; I'll give you an example. Something I really miss when I have to use e.g. a Microsoft Windows environment - I have to when there's no linux-computer available or I just don't have the time for a reboot on the dual-boot machines - is the Alt+Mouse magic. To drag a window around in Gnome, you can simply hold down the Alt-button and drag the window around with your left-mousebutton. You can grab the window at any spot, you won't destroy any of it's contents. so, when the title-bar of a window is offscreen, you can get that one back! i haven't found a way yet to do that in MS Windows. There's a great trick relevant to this one; when a window is maximised and you drag it downwards, it unmaximizes. Drag it back while still holding down the mousebutton and it gets maximised again! This is great to have a peek at your desktop and any applications.
One more; hold down Alt and drag with the middle mouse-button, you see how easy it is to resize a window without having to get your mouse cursor exactly on those corners first? I love it :D!

EDIT: I added some more Metacity (Gnome Windowmanager) tricks in my next blog(s). (01/02/2005)

I'm so excited, just can't hide it!

2004-12-29T18:21:00.000+01:00

Here I am again. My 3rd post today (EDIT: the 2 previous posts were deleted due to being off-topic), I probably won't be posting this frequently after this first day but hey, I'm new at this and I'm so enthusiastic 8D ! I don't know whether it's unpleasant to read text with smileys, but I can't express myself in any other way right now. I think this 3rd post will be the first official one, next time around this blog will be up and running for real! I keep track of many gnome-related blogs, most of 'm come nicely together nicely at planet gnome, but all those are written from the developer/author's perspective. Perhaps it's just me, but I'd seen no gnome-related blogs yet from the user's perspective. I hope I can fill that gap. If you've seen this page some minutes/hours ago, you would have never returned as it didn't look good at all. Bart - the friendly guy behind BartenDavid.be (a must-read website for Dutch-speaking linux-interested people) - helped me out with the template for this page and I really like it. Thanks mate!
How about the title ? "GNOME: T.U.X." I think it sounds great, comment on it if you don't like it.

See yah!