If you’d like to get some nice thumbnails of your OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents, follow these instructions from Webupd8:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flimm/ooo-thumbnailer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ooo-thumbnailer

Once installed, restart Nautilus:

nautilus -q

Nice and simple!

For a couple of weeks, instead of seeing thumbnails in my Nautilus folders, I just see the default “Still Loading” icon. This is very annoying to me. Searching around people just suggest deleting the folder where thumbnails are cached.

If you need to debug Nautilus, like if it continues to have trouble creating thumbnails, look into the debug log options on this page. This didn’t help me very much- the thumbnailers don’t seem to output but you may find something useful with that log file.

If that’s happening to you, do these things:

1. First try the simple solution- F5 which tells Nautilus to refresh. Sometimes it just hasn’t displayed the thumbnail it has ready for you. If that doesn’t work, continue to step 2.
2. In a terminal, run rm -rf ~/.thumbnails
3. Now run killall nautilus

When Nautilus restarts, it will begin creating thumbnails right away.

What I noticed is that when I opened a folder with lots of files, the thumbnailing would proceed quickly whenever you do the last two steps in my list above (clearing the thumbnail cache and restarting nautilus). A visual way of debugging is to then look for the first file that is trying to create a thumbnail and is not succeeding. For me it’s stopping on creating a thumbnail for an html file. gconf, the GNOME Configuration Editor, tells me when I search (Edit > Find) for ‘html’ that those thumbnails are handled by gnome-web-photo from the openSUSE-11.1-OSS repository. You can, in gconf, just disable that thumbnailer and restart Nautilus again.

But I want html thumbnails! Must have them! So I get the command that is being run from gconf and run it directly in the terminal like this:

gnome-web-photo --mode=thumbnail --size=256 records.html ~/Desktop/records.png

with this result:


(gnome-web-photo:16037): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: cannot register existing type `GtkMozEmbed'

** (gnome-web-photo:16037): CRITICAL **: void gtk_moz_embed_realize(GtkWidget*): assertion `GTK_IS_MOZ_EMBED(widget)' failed


I’ll figure it out eventually. I’m betting it’s because I’m using Firefox 3.5 from the mozilla repository on the openSUSE Build Service and I see that I have three separate versions of xulrunner installer. I don’t know for sure but I believe xulrunner provides the files this is choking on. Again, I could be wrong.

Keep in mind that you may also be hitting a ceiling on how much space your thumbnails are taking up. People have tons of files, photos, documents, movies and once these each have a thumbnail, it’s possible to overwhelm the 512 MB that GNOME sets aside for use by the thumbnailers. It may be enough, but if you have a big hard drive, you can up the limit like this:

1. Open gconf and search for ‘thumbnail’
2. In the search results select ‘/desktop/gnome/thumbnail_cache’
3. In that node there are two options, maximum_age and maximum_size. maximum_size’s tip says “Maximum size of the thumbnail cache, in megabytes. Set to -1 to disable cleaning.” and maximum_age’s says “Maximum age for thumbnails in the cache, in days. Set to -1 to disable cleaning.”. I set them both to -1 but I’m guessing I will change maximum_age to something else since otherwise I will likely have stale thumbnails which is still a bit annoying.
4. In a terminal, run rm -rf ~/.thumbnails
5. Now run killall nautilus

For some reason, lately I’ve noticed that Nautilus (which is the GNOME file manager and is the part of your Linux system that draws the desktop in GNOME) isn’t keeping up with picture thumbnails. An easy temporary fix is to press F5 which will refresh the desktop.

I realized it was not a problem generating the thumbnail because if you navigate in a Nautilus window to /home/username/Desktop the thumbnails show up. The only clues I saw about the bug are from a couple years ago and claim the bug’s been fixed- so maybe it’s a new one or maybe it’s back.

At the office we have a file server for staff to move files like presentations and documents around. I haven’t used it much since I’m the only web guy and people usually e-mail things straight to me when I need them. But starting next Monday, I’ll have a coworker to help with the websites so I delved into setting up the Windows share.

I’m increasingly frustrated by openSUSE. It seems like so many things that should be simple just aren’t. I know I’ve done this in Ubuntu. Nautilus was unable to browse the network shares at all. mount.cifs is the program that actually ties the Windows® share to your filesystem and doesn’t allow anyone but root to run it.

So I decided to add it to my permanent shares in /etc/fstab. But I don’t want it to be mounted automatically because a) I don’t want the overhead and b) I won’t need it all the time.

After consulting several websites, I found clues here but the breakthrough was when I found this “Cool Solution”. Thanks to that article, the share is now as it should be. Except… I want it to show up in Nautilus in the sidebar to mount at will without even entering a terminal. Anyone?

The Nautilus File Manager could be considered the core of the GNOME Desktop Environment. It manages your desktop and organizes your files. I’m very partial to it having used it when it was a preview release from Eazel, Inc.

Some newer things I hadn’t been aware you could do (and I found by accident):

• Type and Find: I don’t know if that’s what it’s called, but whenever you’re in a Nautilus window (or even an open or save dialog), go to the files area (you may have to click in there if it’s a dialog), and just start typing the filename you’re looking for. Nautilus automatically jumps to whatever you’re typing. Fantastic.
• Regular Expression Search: Regular Expressions don’t come easily to me. I’ve gradually become more adept but I don’t think I’ll be able to handle this feature for a while. Still, when I pressed CTRL + S in a Nautilus window and it prompted me for a Regular Expression to filter the files by, I was very impressed.

One last thing I’ve added to my Nautilus experience is tagging. I noted on some sites that Nautilus could tag files with metadata but for some reason this feature doesn’t ship in Ubuntu. What this could mean is that you can tag a file that has to do with finances as ‘finances’ and then in your search mechanism, even though the file is named QuickBooks export and has nothing but numbers in it, when you search for finances it pulls that up. Months ago, I experimented on the Mac with using Quicksilver, Spotlight comments and Default Folder X to organize my files with metadata. I didn’t stick with it, but I really like the idea- if you’re interested I believe there were some video podcasts on tuaw.com about this.

I was very fortunate to find a set of instructions to enable tagging in Ubuntu. The how-to is for an older version of Ubuntu (we’re currently on Intrepid Ibex and this was for Gutsy Gibbon- 2 versions ago) but seems to work fine. The basics:

1. Install python-nautilus package:sudo aptitude install python-nautilus
2. Download “Tags-Tab”-Extension and move it to .nautilus/python-extensions (you may have to create this folder)
3. Restart Nautilus:
   Alt+F2 and type in killall nautilus

Now you can start tagging files and folders. Simply right-click on the item you want to tag, go to the “Tag”-tab and insert your tags.

tracker-tags-tab.py

tracker-tags-tab.py (local mirror)

Approximating the Spotlight search tool, I installed the Deskbar Applet and can find my tagged files like a charm. I wonder if it works in GNOME Do…