Using Nautilus in Xubuntu 11.10

January 9th, 2012 • , , • No Comments

Like many people, I’ve found the new things in the Linux desktop environment world – i.e. GNOME 3 and Unity – to be more of a hindrance than a help. For this reason I’ve switched to Xubuntu, which allows me to stick to my previous multi-window multi-desktop multi-monitor workflow.

People making this transition might not find themselves too comfortable with XFCE’s file manager, Thunar. Switching the default file manager to Nautilus (GNOME’s file manager) is actually pretty simple, however there are a few issues with correctly handling the desktop background and icons. The setup described here will switch the default file manager to Nautilus, but leave XFCE and Thunar in control of the desktop. This is because Nautilus, if allowed to control the desktop icons, will also try and set the desktop background. Complete control of its background settings is only possible by manually editing dconf settings, or using gnome-control-center which depends on the whole of GNOME being installed. Of course if you already have desktop icons disabled you won’t notice any change in desktop handling at all.

So on with the show. Obviously, you first need to install Nautilus:

sudo apt-get install nautilus

Next, you need to tell XFCE to use Nautilus as the default file manager. This can be done through: XFCE menu -> Settings -> Settings Manager -> Preferred Applications -> “Utilities” tab -> “File Manager” drop-down.

Now any time you open a folder you should get Nautilus instead of Thunar. Unfortunately the first time you do this Nautilus will realise it isn’t managing the desktop and will try to do so. This behaviour can be disabled by setting the appropriate dconf entry:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/background/show-desktop-icons false

If you have desktop icons enabled in XFCE what you have is an instance of Thunar displaying the contents of ~/Desktop, which means any directory you double-click on will also launch in Thunar. This probably isn’t what we want, but unfortunately we can’t change this default behaviour. What we can do is make it easier to launch the directory in Nautilus by adding a “custom action” – the end result will be a “Open in Nautilus” item in the context menu when you right click directories on the desktop.

Launch Thunar and open the “Custom Actions” dialog (Edit -> Configure custom actions…). Add a new action, setting the command to nautilus %F and making sure only “Directories” is checked on the “Appearance Conditions” tab. Also check “Startup notification” and set the icon to be the correct one for Nautilus. If this is too much like hard work, the following ugly shell one-liner should achieve the same result:

mv .config/Thunar/uca.xml .config/Thunar/uca.xml.bak ; sed 's/<\/actions>$/<action><icon>nautilus<\/icon><name>Open in Nautilus<\/name><command>nautilus %F<\/command><description><\/description><patterns>*<\/patterns><startup-notify\/><directories\/><\/action><\/actions>/' .config/Thunar/uca.xml.bak > .config/Thunar/uca.xml

If you used the shell one-liner, the change will only take effect on new instances of Thunar. If you don’t want to logout of XFCE and login again, this can be achieved by opening the Settings Manager, going to Desktop -> “Icons” tab, and switching “Icon type” to “None” and back to “File/launcher icons”.

Of course the nicest result would have been to have Nautilus managing the desktop instead. At first glance this looks like it should be possible, since there is a /org/gnome/desktop/background/draw-background setting in dconf, however changing this setting has no effect on Nautilus’ behaviour.

Spoofing MAC address on Ubuntu Maverick

October 12th, 2010 • , • No Comments

Continuing the trend of accidentally disabling hacks that people rely on, it now no longer appears to be possible to set your network card’s MAC by adding a line like the following to /etc/rc.local:

ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:0C:xx:xx:xx:xx

It seems that for some reason something (presumably NetworkManager) is resetting the device’s MAC address when the computer wakes from suspend. However, at the same time, the “Cloned MAC address” field has been added to NetworkManager’s “Edit connection” dialog, and this is where your desired MAC address should be entered.

Batch Re-tabbing Files with Vim

May 23rd, 2010 • • No Comments

So you have your favourite tabbing convention, but you’ve ended up with some files in some other convention, for example tabs instead of 4 spaces. If you use Vim and already have it set up to your liking, the :retab command will replace indents in the current buffer with those matching your convention. It’s a bit tedious to do this manually for each file, so if you trust Vim not to make a mistake (or you’re using version control) you can use a bit of scripting-fu to make it easier:

for F in *.{c,h}pp ; do vim -c ":retab" -c ":wq" "$F" ; done

Remapping Mouse Buttons on Ubuntu Lucid

April 23rd, 2010 • , • 4 Comments

For ergonomic reasons (discussed previously) I like a side button on my mouse to act as a middle button instead.  Unfortunately there still doesn’t seem to be an “easy” way to remap mouse buttons in Linux, and what’s more the method of changing such settings seems to keep changing.  To achieve the same results in Ubuntu Lucid, I added an Xorg configuration fragment at /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-logitech-mx1100.conf:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Logitech MX1100 button remap"
        MatchProduct "Logitech USB Receiver"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 9 10"
EndSection

As with the previous method, xinput list should give you the product string to use for MatchProduct.

Fixing ugly Qt fonts in GNOME

April 17th, 2010 • , • No Comments

So far every time I’ve used Qt applications under GNOME, especially VirtualBox, I’ve found the Qt font rendering to be appalling.  See this screenshot of VirtualBox alongside the GNOME appearance dialog:

screenshot_001

As you can see, most of my font settings are at the default “Sans” font.  The “Sans” and “Sans serif” fonts , at least in recent Ubuntu releases, refer to the corresponding DejaVu font variants (previously it was Bitstream Vera).  However as I found out through experimentation, whilst Qt is obeying my font settings, the generic “Sans” font seems to mean something completely different (at least to Qt4).  If I instead specify the DejaVu fonts directly in my font settings, the correct font rendering is used:

screenshot_002

So that’s it: if you’re using GNOME and you seem to get a Qt font rendering that doesn’t match your GTK font rendering, try using a more specific font.  (Note: I haven’t got a clue what “Sans” actually means to GNOME, but it doesn’t appear to be a font in it’s own right.)

When Dynamic Typing Goes Wrong

July 8th, 2009 • • No Comments

Yesterday I found out first-hand how using a dynamically typed language can get you into trouble in unexpected ways whilst writing unit tests for CSF (my PHP framework).

Read the rest of this entry »

Why .NET Won’t Beat Java (Yet)

June 23rd, 2009 • , , • 2 Comments

It’s been no real secret that the .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) has been Microsoft’s answer to Java. Garbage collection, bytecode compilation, large set of core libraries, it’s all there. But there is a problem that I’ve encountered recently: distribution size and install base.

A fairly clean Windows XP machine is fairly certain to not have anything higher than .NET 1.x installed. Anything really compelling in the .NET framework requires 3.5. This means somehow you need to get version 3.5 onto the machine somehow.  This isn’t a problem in Windows Vista and later, which include the framework.  Microsoft’s answer to simple deployment is it’s “ClickOnce” system, where an application automatically installs .NET from the Internet (if necessary) before installing itself.  Sure, it’s a 60MB download, but it only needs to be done once.

The real issue is when you can’t guarantee an Internet connection or a working .NET 3.5 installation.  At this point you must resort to the offline installation, and this is where .NET and Java are very different.  For Java 1.6 SE, the offline installer is 16MB for Windows 32-bit.  For .NET 3.5, the offline installer is a 200MB universal package, with no way to cut out the parts you don’t need.  Java in fact is so small relatively speaking that many applications actually include the JRE in their package (for example OpenOffice – 148MB with JRE vs. 134MB without), whereas .NET can turn a 10MB application into a 210MB monstrosity.

Now in my particular situation, I’m embarassed to have chosen to use C#/.NET/WPF for a simple tool at work.  For programming the tool itself, it was certainly the fastest option – other kinds of Windows programming, e.g. MFC or Forms, just look painful, and I thought the barrier to entry would be lower than Java.  However this 1MB tool requires the 200MB .NET offline installer to be carted around with it because the network it’s used on is completely separate from the Internet.

.NET will only be really appealing once it’s ubiquitous, but then “critical mass” is one of the big problems for lots of software.  For now, I think I’m going to try Java next time…

Mouse Button Remapping with HAL

June 13th, 2009 • • 7 Comments

I’ve had a Logitech MX1000 mouse for a few years now, and the two most important features for me have been the ergonomic build and the few extra buttons. Something I’ve always found with many-buttoned mice is that the side button closest to the thumb is a much more ergonomic way to “middle click” than the actual middle mouse button—it’s a much more natural motion. Middle clicks are quite useful these days, especially with them being a standard way of closing tabs (and opening them in browsers), and having such a popular button perched on a rocking and rolling peak is far from ideal.

Since I’m primarily a Linux user, I don’t have Logitech’s own SetPoint software at my disposal, so I’ve always had to find a way to get this functionality in some other way. When I first got the mouse, this method involved deliberately using a “basic” mouse driver (referred to in xorg.conf as “IMPS/2″), which didn’t support many mouse buttons. The effect was that the button mappings wrapped around, leaving button 8, my preferred “middle click”, mapped to button 2 (8 mod 3), the real middle button.

Unfortunately, newer Xorg versions became smarter and better capable of handling more buttons, and this workaround ceased to function. For the next while, I used something even more hackish: xbindkeys combined with xmacroplay to simulate a middle click with the following part of my .xbindkeysrc:

"echo ButtonRelease 8 ButtonPress 2 ButtonRelease 2 | xmacroplay -d 0 :0.0 &"
    b:8

The downside to this solution is that there are some cases where the button events don’t work correctly, one of them being open-in-tab from a bookmark menu in Firefox. It seemed the best solution would be to get Xorg to remap the buttons in such a way that button 8 really was just an extra button 2. The “xinput” utility lets you set button maps in this way—this wiki entry shows how to remap mouse buttons (even if for a different purpose).

This method worked fine, and I put it in my startup programs for GNOME, but it didn’t persist after suspend/resume. It appears that when resuming, USB devices get “reattached”, and therefore don’t keep the settings applied to them the last time they were attached. The workaround for this is to set a policy using a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) .fdi file. These files live in /etc/hal/fdi/policy (at least they do on Ubuntu) and allow you to set various properties on input devices. This page on the Ubuntu wiki gave me the recipe I needed to remap buttons based on the device name. I ended up with the following .fdi file (which I saved at /etc/hal/fdi/policy/logitech-mx1000.fdi):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 
<!-- Remap Logitech MX1000 buttons so that the most accessible side button
     acts as a middle button -->
 
  <device>
    <match key="info.product" string="Logitech USB RECEIVER">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
 
</deviceinfo>

Now, whenever my Logitech mouse is connected, it gets the buttons remapped—this includes when resuming from suspend. Problem solved… until things are changed again of course!

The Rise and Fail of Facebook

June 10th, 2009 • • 2 Comments

A recent Lifehacker story about a Greasemonkey script to remove quiz stuff from Facebook made me realise something: you know your site is too “web 2.0″ when users are going out of their way to remove features. A quick search on Userscripts.org reveals that a substantial proportion of the Facebook-related scripts are either for removing features or auto-playing game applications.

I feel that Facebook started off pretty well.  The initial target audience seemed to be students, and that’s what most of the users were.  It was friendly and uncluttered, compared to other social networking sites like MySpace.  This spread to a wider audience, first sucking in kids and then adults.  This was less than ideal for some, the idea of their parents on a social networking site being horrifying, but still not a disaster.

But in the midst of all this, the apocalypse happened: a powerful API which allowed other people to extend the functionality of Facebook by creating applications that people could add to their account.  Gradually users became innundated with an unstoppable torrent of application requests, caused by application developers making the “tell all your friends” step seem (or be) necessary to using their application.  The average user’s profile became a mess of applications competing for screen space.  The target audience became those who have the time to play endless Flash games, answer endless quizzes, and generally clutter the “requests” page of their friends.

And so Facebook became MySpace 2.0—gaudy and cluttered, with infinite ability to add more clutter.  Maybe the lesson learned is that the moment you allow anything “shiny” in a social networking site, your demographic will degenerate to schoolkids who want to fill their profiles with as much of it as possible.

Personally, I’ve reduced my Facebook interaction for the past 2 years to having the site email me when anybody says something directly to me either via message or on my “wall”.  There is just too much clutter now for me to wade through the endless application requests, friend requests from people I don’t know, and news feed items generated by the latest viral quiz.  And maybe pictures of friends getting drunk have lost their novelty value…

Spectacular IE7 CSS box model failure

May 17th, 2009 • • No Comments

When re-theming DokuWiki to fit in with the general look-and-feel of this blog, I thought it would look good to have buttons with images relevant to what they did. Having created the necessary, CSS, I subjected it to my multi-browser test bed (actually a Windows XP virtual machine with the latest versions of the top 5 browsers running in it). The CSS I used was along the lines of this:

div.dokuwiki form.btn_show .button {
  padding: 1px 0 1px 16px;
  background: transparent url(images/page.png) 0px 1px no-repeat;
  border: none;
}

One thing that became apparent is that IE7 has absolutely no idea how to render this. The correct rendering (as produced by Firefox 3 and all the other browsers) is this:

button-background-image-ff3

IE7′s take on rendering this looked more like this:

button-background-image-ie7

After a bit more experimentation, I came up with the following illustration which roughly shows what is happening:

The nice thing is that this is fixed in the upcoming IE8, so I’ve taken the stress-free approach; since it’s a relatively “minor” visual bug, there’s no sense it tearing my hair out trying to make it render correctly everywhere. On this occasion I’ve decided that people can either deal with the fact their browser is behind the times, or upgrade, or wait for the upgrade to happen for them.

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