Playing DVD iso's

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 !