GNOME

Packages for nautilus you wish were installed by default in ubuntu

Intro

Thanks to a tip I picked up at Tombuntu about nautilus, after following up on a trick to add files to mocp through nautilus scripts trackback link from Hilltop Yodler (great article), when doing a google search for GiS for nautilus-actions (apt-get install nautilus-actions). I learned about 3 kick ass additions to the nautilus menu. I realized Fedora Linux and Linux Mint had some of these in their context menus but didn’t make the connection to ubuntu until now.

On with the Show

sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal nautilus-image-converter nautilus-gksu

for some kick ass options in the context (right click) menu of nautilus (your default file manager in ubuntu). For more information, check out the tombuntu article I linked above.

pkill nautilus

to restart nautilus and have the new packages in your context menu

More

If you’re interested in this, you’ll probably also like my article about nautilus-actions.

screenshot-recordmydesktop-1

Make Screencasts in Ubuntu with gtk-recordmydesktop

Yeah, the name sounds cliche but man oh man is this app slick. Compared to some of the others I tried, this one _just_worked_ and had the options I needed, plus more.

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

screenshot-recordmydesktop-1

You can select a specific window or an arbitrary area and it compresses to ogv automatically.

Here’s a quick video I recorded in seconds — http://z.nexuizninjaz.com/videos/nst.ogv

Reverting two Ubuntu features ‘removed’ in 9.04

Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 has many improvements on the prior release of Intrepid 8.10, however 2 things were removed that I didn’t agree with. They are pretty easy to change back so I wanted to share them with you all.

Update Notifier in system tray

I guess the idea behind this change was intended to make updates more obvious… but to power-users like myself, I consider it an annoyance. Every time I’d run apt-get, a “update yo shiz” window would pop up above my terminal and anger me. I’m not the stupid windows user Ubuntu’s starting to treat me like. I just don’t have time for updates that require a restart in the middle of the day when I’m trying to get some work done.

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

tip from launchpad

Ctrl+Alt+Backspace

This would classically restart X… but for some reason they removed this as well?!?! Whatever, here’s how to fix it.

sudo aptitude install dontzap && sudo dontzap –d

tip from Chris Johnston