nautilus actions

Sebastien, as his usual, is prodigal with tips and trick on how to create a comfortable and productive working linux environment. In his long series of that kind of posts i’d like to translate some in italian (on my blog or in the wiki of the ILDNpedia project (when it will be “in production”) when he doesn’t provides one.

So, today i’ve decided to start with the argument in the topic.

INTRO

Nautilus-actions is an extensions for nautilus which allow to add arbitrary program to launch through the nautilus popup menu of selected files.

Each time you right-click on one or several selected files in nautilus, nautilus-actions will look at its configured actions to see if a program has been setup for this selection. If it is the case, it will add an item in the menu that allow you to execute the program on the selected files.

The aim of Nautilus-actions is to be very flexible and to adapt to the most common situation.

Nautilus-actions doesn’t provide any config by default except an item to configure your actions. Its configuration is stored into GConf since v0.99, so it offers the possibility for other software that manage files to add their configs into the Nautilus-actions GConf entry and automagically integrates smoothly to nautilus without any additional code. It is also possible to import a foreign config, downloaded over the Net for example, into Nautilus-actions throught NACT, its configuration tool.

INSTALLATION

If we have a Fedora Core machine the installation is easy as usual:

yum install nautilus-actions

and then:

yum install nautilus-open-terminal nautilus-image-converter nautilus-sendto

others *.schemas files are available on the official site of the project.

USE

Now we can list some of the most common (and so useful) actions available.

Open in gEdit as root: let’s you open and modify a file in Gedit. This function comes really handy when we have to deal with config’s file around the filesystem. For a correct working we have to make a little change in the visudo file, like:: “username ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/gedit” and modify the action so that it will be lauched using sudo.

Set picture as wallpaper: to change the desktop appearance on the fly.

Nautilus open terminal : opens a terminal session (as the current user) in the working directory (like Konqueror does, i can add).

Convert Audio: Converts audio files from one format to another. This actions needs to have a previously installed version of audio-convert to work at its best.

Nautilus image resizer: lets you resize and image on the fly. It does also give a new name to the file it generates.

Compress selected files using gzip: compress a file and deletes the original one.

Tag media files with Easytag: enable us to modify the tags of a music file using easytag (that we must have installed on our box, yum install easytag).

Mount ISO et Umount ISO: mount and unmounts ISO files. Pleas notice that we have to put the “miso” file into ~/bin directory and give a chmod 755 ~/bin/miso to enable it.

Run ISO image in QEMU: lauches ISO files as cd using Qemu (which, as before, needs to be already installed on your box, as usual a simple yum install qemu is sufficent).

Install rpms: installs an RPM package.

Install Deb Files: installs a DEB package, for Debian and Ubuntu users.

RESOURCES

Sebastien’s post: Nautilus Actions
website : http://www.grumz.net/
Nautilus Actions : External Resources

PS = Since Sebastien (in the comment area) asked me to explicitly declare it, this post is licenced as:

technorati tags:nautilus, nautilus-actions, gnome, fedora

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