Fixing the Nautilus garbage bin again

Usability bugs are nasty, they tend to be a major point of frustration for novice users, yet their importance is sometimes hard to explain to developers.

An even worse situation occurs when such bugs, once worked around, come back to bite you in a later software release because of a lack of developer foresight.

I am going to discuss a work around for a bug I’ve already discussed in the past. I’m going to skip going into the details of how this bug arises, please read the previous post for those.

Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” upgrade notes

As experienced computer users know, the fresh-released versions of products are typically not very stable and reliable. It takes a few months (Typically until the x.1 version is released) for the product to really stabilize and become production-ready. This also seems to be true for Free and Open-Source software, though the maturing rate seems to be faster.

Knowing that, I typically wait a couple of months after an Ubuntu release before I take the time to upgrade. When it comes to Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, a further reason not to upgrade was provided by the fact that up until now it didn’t include a stable version of Firefox.

I finally decided to take the time and upgrade the Ubuntu version on my personal home computer yesterday. The upgrade didn’t went as smoothly as I hoped it would. Most of the issues can be blamed on the manual tweaks I’ve made to my system. Not all, however.

Below is a list of the issues I’ve encountered during and after the upgrade, and the solutions I came up with (when applicable).

Some long-awaited features in GNOME 2.22

I’ve been reading the GNOME 2.22 Release Notes which generally contain a laundry-list of nice-to-have features and improvements, when I stumbled across the following 2 lines in section 5.2 discussng improvement to administration tools:

The Shared Folders tool now allows you to edit the SMB user database (smbpasswd).

The Network tool can now set up PPPoE and GPRS connections.

I cannot stress enough how important I perceive those improvements to be.

Fixing Thumbnails in Nautilus

If you are like me and many other internet users, you’ve probably downloaded movies with one P2P program or another.

If you did that downloading while using Nautilus and Gnome, you might have noticed that Nautilus fails to produce Thumbnails for downloaded movies, presenting the film-roll Icon instead.

What happens here, is that Nautilus attempts to generate thumbnails for files as soon as you enter the directory that contains them, when it comes to files that are only halfway-downloaded it fails for obvious reasons.

The problem is that when Nautilus fails to generate a thumbnail, that failure is noted down somewhere, and therefore Nautilus does not attempt to regenerate the thumbnail once the file is fully downloaded.

Viewing Nautilus script parameter values

I’ve been working on some Nautilus scripts recently, and I’ve found that it would be easier if I could inspect the values that Nautilus passes to the scripts, so I wrote a little script to achieve just that, I hope you’ll find it useful if you ever set out to write a Nautilus script.