bobpeers -> blog

I read today that Gnome 2.24 has been released. There’s a few nice features but tabs in Nautilus seems like the one I’ll find the most useful (assuming you can drag files between tabs). Actually the biggest deal for many users will be that this 7 year old bug in GTK has been fixed.

Many people have probably encountered this bug when the mouse is hovering over the location of a button on a form that opens under the mouse. In this situation the button cannot be clicked until you move the mouse away and back over the button. It’s a really annoying bug and I’m glad it’s fixed.

Gnome 2.24 will be in Fedora 10 due to be released on 25th of November so I’ll have to wait until then for a test drive.

After my previous post about GNU Privacy Assistant and not having an easy encryption option built into Nautilus it seems that i didn’t look very far.

Today I researched a bit deeper and installed Gnome Seahorse. Essentially this does exactly what I was looking for.

• It allows creation of new keys.
• It recognised already created keys, my pgp key created using GPA yesterday was immediately available.
• Encrytion, decryption and signing are all built into nautilus either through the file menu or the context sensitive menu when you right click on a file or folder.
• It actually prompts me for my pgp key passphrase, unlike GPA!

Next I might look into encrypting whole partitions. I know this can be done during the install process using the Anaconda installer with Fedora but from the pages I’ve read it seems that to encrypt a partition after install is considerably harder, plus all the data on the partition is lost during the process so it’s not a simple procedure.

One feature that I really like in Gnome 2.22 is the new file operation dialog used when moving or copying files in Nautilus.

If you select multiple files at once to copy you just get a single progress bar showing the progress as a whole of all the files.
However if you start a copy/move and then start subsequent copy/moves instead of opening their own dialogs they are just added to the already open progress dialog as shown here:

This gives much more information plus it really stops screen clutter by keeping all the information in one place.

The only slight niggle I have is that as the amount copied is updated twice per second it makes the whole line of text jump left and right as the numbers change width. It would be much nicer if the amount copied had it’s own label so it didn’t affect the rest of the text.

I upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.5 tonight.

Normally I would unzip the files to my local computer, start up gFTP, and simply upload the files. Quick and easy.

For a change I decided to do the whole process within Nautilus since I have the ftp account to my web host set up as a mounted folder within Nautilus. Soon after starting I regretted this choice, the main problem was one of speed.

My internet connection varies slightly but averages around 8-10 Mbits/s download and upload since it’s an symmetric line. However tonight when uploading 2 folders containing 511 files Nautilus would spend about 3 minutes just preparing for uploading and then it took about 25 minutes to uplad the files.

During this time my netspeed applet reported an upload speed of about 20kbits/s. Just to check it wasn’t a problem at my end I emailed a 2 MB file just afterwards and sure enough it was sent in a matter of seconds.

Ironically enough, today I was reading an ars technica review about the release of GNOME 2.22 and the new GNOME virtual file system (GVFS). It sound like something that will fix a lot of my complaints with the current system which, to be frank, just seems unreliable.

As another example, just a few days ago I tried the ‘Connect to Server’ option with Nautilus to mount an SSH connection. Nautilus just responded with the error:

Nautilus cannot display “ssh://root@172.16.*.***:22/”.

Please select another viewer and try again.

I know this works fine from the command line so it’s definately a Nautilus issue.