Managing Nautilus from the keyboard

You don’t have to be slowed down by the mouse just because you are using a GUI. Nautilus has great keyboard shortcuts that will allow you to use it quickly and effectively.

Here is a quick table of the shortcut keys and their functionality

Advanced file permissions

The default UI for managing file permissions in Nautilus is a simple cutdown version that I find hard to use compared to the “advanced” view. Here is a screenshot of the advanced view:

Enable this view by changing the gconf setting show_advanced_permissions in /apps/nautilus/preferences/ to True, either by using gconftool-2 in console or the GUI tool gconf-editor.

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_advanced_permissions True

Desktop Settings

The default icons that show up on your desktop are also managed through gconf. Here are some of the important settings:

Disable the desktop completely (don’t show any desktop icons)

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop --type bool False

Hide the $HOME folder icon

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/home_icon_visible --type bool False

Display the computer icon

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/computer_icon_visible --type bool True

Hide the trash icon

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/trash_icon_visible --type bool False

Hide volumes (sshfs mounts, auto mounted removable disks, etc)

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/volumes_visible --type bool False

Special locations and Remote connections

Nautilus provides some special locations which provide additional functionality, they can be accessed from the “go” menu or by typing them in the location bar.

• computer:/// - A list of all mounted devices on the system
• burn:/// - Allows you to copy files to it and burn them to a CD/DVD
• network:/// - A list of servers on the network

You can also access remote file systems from nautilus using ssh, sftp, and samba. You can do this by using the protocol in the address bar (ssh://,smb://,sftp://), like:

sftp://user@server:port/directory/on/server

Or you can use a very convenient UI from File -> Connect to server. Here is a screenshot of that in action:

Tips and Tricks

Preview audio files
You can preview sounds in Nautilus by turning on Edit -> Preferences -> Preview -> Preview sound files. With this enabled, when you hover over any audio file, it’ll start playing.

You can also enable/disable this setting through gconf

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/preview_sound True

Custom scripts
Nautilus allows us to create our own custom scripts and have them execute from the right click menu, lets create an open as root menu item. In ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ create a file called “Open as Root” with the following code in it:

#!/bin/bash
for uri in $NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_URIS; do
gnomesu gnome-open “$uri”
done

And now you’ll get a menu similar to:

Document Templates
If you’ve ever right clicked on your desktop, you have probably seen the menu “Create Document” but never gave it any thought because the majority of distros ship this menu blank. But I’ve found it is really handy when working with files with similar content. To create your own templates you create the folder ~/Templates and place any type of file inside there, it could be an open office spread sheet or a simple text file. You can download a collection of nice default templates from here. Here is what your menu could look like!

Conclusion

This should get you started on using Nautilus more effectively. If you want to learn more about Nautilus settings and other options you can tweak, you should check out the Nautilus gconf documentation here.

After you run power top, it’ll analyze your system for a few seconds and not only alert you of the major applications and/or hardware that are draining your battery, but also solutions on fixing these issues. Here is a screenshot of it in action:

When you have powertop apply a suggested change it does not modify your system settings, it will only persist the change(s) as long as powertop is open, as soon as you close it the changes will revert back to system defaults.

Install and remove packages by name, version, or capability.

Installing and removing packages with wildcards

# zypper rm gtk*devel*
# zypper in gtk-sharp?

Handling multiple versions of a package

# zypper in package-1.2.3
# zypper rm package>1.2.3

Install and Remove at the same time, - means remove, + means install.

# zypper in <package to install> -<package to remove> +<another package to install>

Force a re-install

# zypper in --force <package>

Install plain RPM files and satisfy dependencies from repositories from a local disk or the web.

# zypper in ./file.rpm
# zypper in http://<url>/file.rpm

Update all installed packages with newer available version where possible

To get all updates that only include patches/bug fixes you can run this command:

# zypper up

To update all packages even if they are new versions, or to upgrade from one version of openSUSE to another:

# zypper dup

Manage Source / Development Packages

Install build dependencies for a package

# zypper si -d <package>

Pattens / Metapackages

You can list all available patterns by doing:

# zypper pt

Install the pattern xfce

# zypper in -t pattern xfce

Easily manage repositories

List repositories

# zypper lr

Add a repository

# zypper ar <url> <name>

Disable the first repository

# zypper mr -d 1

Disable a repository by name

# zypper mr -d repo-oss

Remove the first repository

# zypper rr 1

Getting info on packages

Searching for a package

# zypper se banshee-1
# zypper se bans*

Searching for a pattern/metapackage

# zypper se -t pattern media

By default, searching only gives you the name, summary, and type of a package, to get more detailed information like what repository its coming from and what version it is, you can do the following.

# zypper se -s package

View a short description of a package

# zypper if package

Other Cool Tricks

You can simulate any zypper command by putting --dry-run after them

# zypper in --dry-run <package>

You can lock a package in its current state (installed/not installed)

# zypper addlock <package>
# zypper removelock <package>

Get the openSUSE install files

After you have syslinux installed, you are going to have to grab and install CD/DVD from one of the many openSUSE mirrors, you can find the latest versions at http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/. Lets mount the ISO and grab the files that we need, we’ll use a standard Linux command to do so: mount. To mount an iso onto your local file system you need to tell it what file to mount and what location it should mount to.

# mount -o loop <filename> <mount location>

Define what device you want to install from

Next, we’ll need to find the USB device we’d like to install from, you can do this in a few different ways:

# fdisk -l
# cat /proc/partitions
# mount

or you can run:

# dmesg

You’ll see something like:

usb-storage: device found at 5
usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning
scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 1994752 512-byte hardware sectors (1021 MB)

So, from that output you can see that the newly inserted device is /dev/sdb, so if your system doesn’t automount the device (openSUSE should), you can mount it:

# mount /dev/sdb /mnt/thumbdrive

Setup the USB drive to be a bootable installer

Once you have both the ISO and the USB drive mounted, you’ll wanted to copy the install files from the ISO to the USB drive. The install files are in boot/<arch>/loader on the ISO. We’ll also want to rename isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg

# cp /mnt/openSUSE-i386/boot/i386/loader/ * /mnt/thumbdrive
# mv /mnt/thumbdrive/isolinux.cfg /mnt/thumbdrive/syslinux.cfg

The final step is to run syslinux on the USB device, you’ll want to make sure the USB device is unmounted for this.

# umount /mnt/thumbdrive
# syslinux /dev/sdb

Conclusion

Now you have a bootable installer on a USB device that will allow install from all the standard protocols (NFS, FTP, CIFS, etc) as normal. One caveat of this method is that it will now try to install grub onto your thumb drive, so after it boots up the base system into memory, unplug your drive so that it will install to the correct boot partition or MBR.

Grub defines its devices from the BIOS boot order and since we booted off a USB stick it will think that (hd0,0) is the USB stick but in reality, its your actual disk. So on your first boot grub will be pointing to (hd1,0) and not (hd0,0), so you will have to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst and point it to the right disk. You can do this by hitting “E” at the GRUB prompt.