Slashdot Mirror
Nautilus 1.0.5 Release
mz001b writes: "Proof that just because a company goes out of business does not mean that their open source software goes with them -- Nautilus 1.0.5 has been release. See the LinuxToday notice."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
A full list of changes can be found here
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
Performance, if you ask me, has to be their #1 priority. There may be fewer bugs, but bugs in software I don't use due to bad performance doesn't affect me any. I have a 1.4Ghz/512MB system and it remains significantly too slow for me to use productively.
I can't help but think of Mozilla about this time last year. It was horridly slow. And the typical tune on slashdot was something like "Mozilla is so slow it's useless garbage! They should scrap it all and start over." And now the tune has changed, and the general opinion about Mozilla is very positive. Given that, maybe in a year or two Nautilus will pick up in performance and reach a state of usability. I hope, anyway!
I can't say myself if Nautilus is really much slower because I haven't used it myself. If anyone has used it, can you post your observations here?
Cheers,
Jason.
Konqueror does that, and yes, it works with .ogg.
Just enable sound previews (View->Preview->Sound Files)
Any other examples ?
Rik
As an addendum to what I just said, I had a quick look at konqueror and realised that Ogg files didn't preview.
:-)
(Incidentally, I don't know if this breaks anything else, so proceed at your own peril)
After a couple of minutes digging, I found out that in KDE Menu -> Preferences -> File Browsing -> File Associations, Ogg was listed as an Application, rather than an Audio mimetype I have read reasons why this is, but the upshot is that they did not preview. To make it preview, I changed it to an audio mimetype.
Just thought I'd pass the knowledge on
http://www.mozilla.org/performance/jprof.html (jprof)
http://www.mozilla.org/performance/eazel.html (eazel profilers that mozilla guys use)
http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/
of the three, I believe that jprof and oprofile work on the same principle, only oprofile is system-wide and comes with a kernel module.
for debugging, there are tons of malloc replacements (which may or may not require recompilation) besides electricfence. Obviously, I have no idea what other things boundschecker or purify can do, but I'm sure there must be a tool for most pieces of functionality that these programs provide (but not necessarily all at once).
Build with -p if you wish to analyze with prof (I've never done this), or -gp if you want to analyze with gprof. Then learn how to use prof or gprof. Learning to use gprof is a good investment for your time. The only difficult part is correctly interpreting the analysis returned by gprof, which is very detailed. It's not that bad, but it can be daunting at first.
Or you can use the old "ctrl-c" profiling method: run the program in a debugger, and stop it at random times with ctrl-c. Each time, make a note of which function you interrupted. If one function shows up a lot, then optimizing it is probably your best bet for improving performance.
I prefer gprof. =-)
-Paul Komarek
Your point? Are you trying to say that apt is no reason to use debian now that it's been ported to rpm based distros? Now apt rocks, but what sets debian apart from the others[1] in my eyes is the debian policy. Nothing's perfect, but when I install a debian package I have a pretty good idea of what it's going to do and where it's going to install. Some examples are /usr/share/doc/package for every package, every package giving a menu entry
to the debian menu system and therefore automatically appearing in the window
manager menus, and a strict following of fhs (maybe not strict but at least
consitent across packages[2]).
Apt only reaches its full potential when it can be used with confidence, and I can definitely use apt with confidence on my debian box[2]
I'm not dissing other distros. I'm simply stating that in my own experience I feel a confidence with debian that I did not feel with the other distros I've tried. So if one feels safe using apt on debian then apt is most definitely a reason to use debian.
[1] Back in my distro experimenting days, I tried RedHat 5.2, Caldera ?.?, Suse ?.?, RedHat 6.? and debian slink (2.1?). I feel safest installing debian packages and haven't tried another distro since (for better or worse).
[2] At least when I used debian stable. It is unfortunate that debian doesn't release more often. But I have plenty of confidence installing from unstable as long as I'm not upgrading libc or perl.
For a long time I stuck to GMC as my desktop manager, because I figured someone had to run it if we planned on keeping people with small systems happy (there are a lot of under powered machines out of the US).
I finally made the switch because of the simplicity and cleanliness of Nautilus. I did not like Nautilus 1.0, I felt there were too many taste differences between my way of working and Nautilus way of working.
But the Nautilus hackers were quick to respond to the input of the user community, and by the time Nautilus 1.0.3 came out, they had addressed most of the community issues.
Today people are using Nautilus in really creative ways, and I finally made the switch because of all this creativity. Tuomas has a `magnets' package for his desktop and a set of images to play free-form solitaire on the desktop. Sure, they are just toys, but like that there are hundreds of other things being done with Nautilus.
The core foundation in Nautilus is sound, and a lot of people are doing really creative things. For example someone wrote a "3D" viewer for directories. You can at any point switch your default view into 3D-view inside the window. It is just a Bonobo component, you do not even need to touch the Nautilus code to add these third-party views.
Some other people have been writing Nautilus scripts, and I have been using a few of them. They could use some polish, but for being user-contributed things, they are pretty nice.
I also noticed that the new Windows XP shell incorporated various ideas that were in Nautilus or earlier versions of Nautilus and some others were demoed as concepts by Andy as potential services to consumers.
I would like to extend's Andy's idea of "actions" that are available on the left pane to be more comprehensive as it is on XP.
Other features in Nautilus are its support for SVG-icons. Something that has been overlooked for some time. I did not knew about this until I saw someone's desktop with these huge icons (common used things were huge, others were there just for reference). Those huge icons looked perfect (maybe they were 100x100 size), when I asked I found out that it was the new Tuomas/Jakub set of SVG icons.
Many hackers have been using pictures of themselves as their desktop "home". For example Nat's personal home directory has a `Friends' directory, and each `Friends' folder has a high resolution picture of his friends, where he keeps his information. He has a picture of his car for details about his car. Maybe he can post a screenshot of his desktop so you get an idea.
There are many more creative uses of Nautilus out there, but I have to say that as the product matures, more and more options are available.
But Nautilus overall makes for a terrific file manager, but it takes some time to get the best out of it.
I still want to see some of Andy's experimental code that allowed live objects to be shown in Nautilus. At some point I saw someone's desktop contain various "web sites" in a folder. Instead of using an RSS feed, various mini-web sites (fully functional) were embedded into a directory. I wish someone could send me a link to this url.
Miguel.