Michele Campeotto: Tag gnome

gedit Markdown preview plugin

micampe — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 14:12:00 -0700

This weekend I have installed Ubuntu Dapper Flight 6 on my laptop and found it worked pretty well. Among the nice things, suspend/hibernate/resume work fine and are much faster than on Breezy (apart from a little glitch on resume when connected to AC).

Another nice Dapper thing, coming from the included GNOME 2.14, is the new Text Editor, which now has the enhanced capability to add plugins to the application, and you can write plugins in Python.

As I prefer – for various reasons – plain text over using the big word processors, I have written a simple plugin to help writing Markdown formatted text. The plugin will add an HTML preview in gedit’s bottom panel, allowing you to see how your document will look when rendered. For more info and downloads, refer to the wiki page I created.

Everybody knows that ease of extension is a key to success, so I really hope people start to write cool plugins (the snippets one is great for example) and extend gedit to become more and more powerful. I don’t see it replacing my primary development environment anytime soon, but I was already using it for more document-oriented editing tasks, and it’s great to see it becoming better at every iteration.

Sensor applet on a ThinkPad

micampe — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 12:12:00 -0800

It was a boring sunday morning, and friends kept telling me I should write something in here, so I looked for something to do that I could then post here.

Here we are. I recently installed a script to control the fan of my ThinkPad and I used gkrellm to keep an eye on the system’s temperature to check the laptop wasn’t melting.

I didn’t particularly like having gkrellm’s window around, so I looked on Gnome files for an applet that could do the same. I found Sensors Applet, but it only displayed the value reported by the standard ACPI driver, wich is just the CPU temperature. The ibm_acpi driver reports more values in a different file, so I went and added a ThinkPad module to Sensors Applet.

If you want to install the patched version, download Sensors Applet 1.5.2 and my patch.

Uncompress the source and apply the patch:

$ tar xzf sensors-applet-1.5.2.tar.gz
$ cd sensors-applet-1.5.2
$ patch -p1 < sensors-applet-thinkpad.diff

Build and compile as usual (you need to install the applet in the same prefix as the Gnome Panel, unless you know what you are doing):

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/
$ make
$ sudo make install

Add the applet to the panel and activate the sensors as you can see here:

I sent the patch to Alex, I hope he likes it and commits it to the official sources.

Nautilus Quick Burner

micampe — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 06:42:00 -0800

This script comes from an idea launched on the Nautilus mailing list by Tuomas Kuosmanen, who wished a workaround while waiting for somebody to implement drag and drop CD-RW burning in Nautilus.

Note: That idea is now implemented and included in the official Nautilus release.

I don’t think I can implement his whole idea, but I can quickly hack a simple Python/GTK+ script that does part of the job.

The script is meant to be used as a Nautilus script, but it doesn’t contain anything Nautilus related, so you can use it from the CLI too: just specify as command line arguments the files/directories you want to burn. You can also launch it as a standalone program and drop the files in the main window.

The script is simple and dirty, almost no error checking is performed, and to configure it you must edit the source file.

By default it will not burn anything, it will just create an image.img file in the directory where you run it. If you want the script to actually burn your CDs, you should edit the file, change the command line (a commented out example is provided) and remove the -dummy option (yeah, I know this sucks, but I don’t want to burn your CD writer with some wrong option).

Clicking the Cancel button or closing the burning window will immediately stop the execution. You’ll not be asked for confirmation, but you’ve been warned now! ;o)

You can see the results of the script by loopback-mounting the generated image.img file:

# mount -t iso9660 -o loop image.img /mnt/cdrom

Screenshots

Requirements

To run the Nautilus Quick Burner you’ll need GTK+ 2.x (1.3.x may work, too), the latest version of PyGTK (anything over 1.99.7 should work) and a recent version mkisofs and cdrecord (tested with 1.10).

Also note that the user running the script needs to have execution permissions on mkisofs and cdrecord (this isn’t true by default on Red Hat systems).

Download & install

Download quickburn, copy it in your Nautilus scripts directory and make sure it has execution permissions. Then select some files and folders, right click and select Scripts -> QuickBurn.