How to Preview the Gmail's New "Look"?

Gmail, the free web-based e-mail service offered by Google is one of the most popular e-mail services all around the world. Although I think still Yahoo mail is a bit ahead of Gmail but with new features and less distracting ads (oh well, at least when compared to Yahoo, yikes :P) + the simplicity... Gmail will most definitely have an advantage in the future.

Recently Google introduce a new look-n-feel to their home page (+ SERP pages) with a certain Blue and Red color combination. And it seems that (makes sense) they'll be applying this "look-n-feel" to their other services GUIs as well. Although it won't happen overnight but according to the Gmail team, now you can "preview" some of these new features in your Gmail account quite easily.

Not the most user-friendliest colors for my taste :/...

In their own words this is an attempt to make...

"...one of the reasons we’re embarking on a series of interface updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful..."

Although I do agree that after switching to the Gmail preview feature the account looks more simpler but I'm not entirely sure about the user-friendlyness of the whole GUI as a whole because the white background with the Red color aren't that comforting for the eyes and I personally prefer the old Blue and Green combination.

Anyhow you can easily enable this new look-n-feel (which as said before is not fully implemented, yet) by going into your Themes tab in Gmail settings and then scroll-down until you see two themes called "Preview (Dense) and Preview". Choose one of the themes and you're done.

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How to Make Metacity the Default Compositing Window Manager in Ubuntu?

It doesn't matter what operating system that you're using (whether its GNU/Linux, MS Windows, Mac OSX, Solaris and Mars - there isn't one by that name, yet :P) the Window manager is one of the core programs of all operating systems.


What is a window manager?

Don't be angry, I know most know about this already but for all the beginners :)... a window manager is the application that literally "draws" all of those  maximize/close/minimize buttons, title bars, panels... or all the graphical user interfaces of all programs (which are usually called "windows", these days).

So I think that anyone can see the importance of a Window manager by now. Although when it comes to GNU/Linux we have several window managers because unlike many other operating system, GNU/Linux is "scattered".

You know, the Kernel (the software of the OS that deal directly with your hardware) is developed separately and the desktops and lot other apps are developed somewhere else, unlike with MS Windows or Mac OSX where the entire OS is built by the same developers which has both good and bad aspects (story for another day eh ;-)).

For instance, the Qt/KDE desktop uses a window manager for creating its application GUI called Kwin. The Gnome desktop (2.x versions) uses one called Metacity. The X Windows system (which is the core and oldest of all "window drawing" apps for GNU/Linux) uses the Xfmw and the now famous (thanks mainly to Ubuntu actually) the "Compiz" (which is actually a dedicated 3D compositing manager) are just a few to mention.


The good old days ;-)...

The old days there weren't much 3D. In fact there wasn't any at all. So all these window managers, not that long ago were only capable of drawing 2D graphical user interfaces until recently the GPU devices became rather powerful and finally had the ability to draw 3D, complex GUIs.

So, most of those above mentioned WM were "patched" by the developers to enable the support for 3D rendering in GUIs which were only 2D in the recent past. With this trend, the WM received a lot of new features in general. One main one is called "compositing".

Although I won't be going into technical details... compositing in general is a must have (in both 2D and especially 3D) for enabling advanced features such as adding drop shadows, 3D effects, transparency, etc.

Some WM succeeded (such as the Kwin for instance) with this trend but some others like the Metacity wasn't that prominent.

Anyhow after sometime, the Gnome developers did some heavy coding into the Metacity concerning the upcoming Gnome 3 desktop (its already here, but you know in those days) for the future of 3D compositing and they called it Mutter.

So, even though Mutter is based on Metacity and Clutter... they're both separate projects. Thus the original Metacity WM that comes with the Ubuntu 11.04 (and below versions + with classic Gnome desktop) is still the old, 2d friendly WM that does not have the ability to create 3D GUIs. It's still a 2D window manager. 

Anyhow, remember it may not be the most highly advanced WM when you make it the default compositing manager. And unlike with Compiz there aren't a lot of effects integrated into Metacity's compositing "engine" (no 3D effects to begin with) thus don't hope for a lot of effects.

But things like adding a drop shadow and adding transparency, etc are available and on the bright side, it won't take a lot of system resources when comparing with the other WM such as Compiz for instance.

Wait a second here Gayan!. If I cannot have any of those nerdy 3D effects then what do I get after enabling this "compositing" thing?

Well, um... okay, have a look at the below two screenshots.

The first one is a screenshot of Nautilus without any Metacity compositing but the second one was taken after the enabling it. Although there isn't much to talk about but you can see the second one has a nice drop shadow, faster minimizing effects (bit similar to the Compiz ones), etc ... for a start :).

Without...

After enabling... well, better than nothing :/...

And as mentioned, when the Metacity compositing is enabled, the application launcher of Unity 2D will have that transparency effect as well.

Anyhow, you can easily make Metacity the default compositing manger Ubuntu 11.04 Natty narwhal by following the below procedure. But remember, first you have to make sure that the desktop that you run is using the Metacity instead of any other WM that you have installed.

1. Open your GNU/Linux Terminal and enter the below command (yep, we're using the Gnome's setting manager).

gconf-editor

2. Now this should open a Window similar to the below one. From the left side go to: "apps" - "Metacity" -> "General".

3. Now from the options that you'll get to your right scroll-down until you see a setting called "compositing_manager" which is disabled by default. All you gotta do to make Metacity the default Compositing Window manager is to click on the "check-box".

Then you should see a disappearance of the windows of your desktop (don't panic :D), wait for few seconds, if everything went well, then you should see all of your opened windows + this time they'll have some cool shadows, etc.

Now not just enabling compositing but as you can see, there are some other options that you can set such as...

*. Enable/Disable workarounds ("patches" for those "old" and troublesome apps to work with Metacity).

*. Audo raise delay.

*. Enable/disable titlebar display once maximized.

*. Reduce resources - A pretty helpful one from the bunch actually. It'll skip some of those heavy effects to save some of those CPU/GPU/RAM or system resources iof your poor PC/Laptop ;-) in general thus making the desktop much faster.

These are just a few to mention. But as you can see, in general, you can use this window to configure a lot of settings related to Metacity window manager.

That's it. Now we're done. Enjoy!.

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How to Disable "Feedback" Button in Firefox 5?

Few days ago (yesterday actually :)), Mozilla released the latest version of their award winning, highly secure web browser, Firefox 5. Although in comparison with the version 4, id did not bring any huge improvements concerning the GUI... but because of the bug fixes, performance improvements, etc it is well worth installing nonetheless.

Anyway, by default Mozilla Firefox comes with a button called "Feedback" which shows right next to the "Google search" tab. And as most knows the purpose of this Feedback button is to get user feedback faster thus helping to create an even better, secure web browser.

Also, via this button, you can "participate" in user studies and when a user study is available, it'll give you a big notification message which is quiet annoying. So, how can we disable this "Feedback" button in Firefox 5?.

Firefox without the "button" :)...

Simple, once opened, from the menu choose: "Tools" -> "Addons".

Step 1...

Then from the window that you get, from the left choose: "Extensions" and then to the right side of the screen you'll see an extension called "Feedback 1.1.1" (the version might change according to the updates.

Step 2...

Now all you gotta do is, select that "Feedback 1.1.1" extension and click on the "disable" button. That's it!. Now we've successfully disabled that troublesome Feedback feature. Such a short post, I feel cheap :).

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How to Remove Nautilus Thumbnail Cache Folder in GNU/Linux (Gnome)?

Nautilus is default file manager of the GTK written GNU desktop, Gnome. Although this is not the only file manager for GNU/Linux yet, it's simple, easy to use and a pretty "decent" application nonetheless.

Nautilus is actually inspired by Apple's Mac OS's file manager without a doubt and if you want even more simpler "versions" of Nautilus then other file managers such as Thunar and Elementary are quite good too. Even the Unity desktop still uses the Nautilus as the primary file manager in its desktop as well.

Unlike with MS Windows where it save the thumbnails of files it generates within the each folder itself, Nautilus on the other hand stores all the generated thumbnails of videos, pictures, etc in a single folder. Now in comparison with the Microsoft Windows... both these "methods" have their own good and bad aspects about which I won't be talking, since it's out of the scope of this post.

The "decent" Nautilus :)...

Anyway, why is it important to clear this Nautilus Thumbnail cache?

Well, depending on the occasion, this can come in real handy. For instance, say that after installing Ubuntu Linux for the first time, you entered into a folder which contains nothing but video files.

Say that you haven't installed the proprietary codecs, then Nautilus will fail to generate any video thumbnails and "mark" them as "failed" thumbnails. As a result, even after you install all those proprietary codecs, and whenever you enter that "failed thumbnails" folder afterwards, Nautilus, still, will not generate and display thumbnails because it now has an entry which says that it's impossible for that folder.

In that case our solution is to manually delete that cache which would resolve the matter (obviously).

So, how the heck can I do that Gayan?

Simple actually. By default Nautilus stores all those cached/thumbnail details in a folder called "thumbnails" in your "Home" folder.

So after open your "Home" folder and simply press "Ctrl" + "H" keys on your keyboard to make nautilus show hidden files... then scroll down until you see a folder called ".thumbnails" as shown in the below screenshot.

Inside that folder you'll see other 3 folders named "fail", "large", "normal". Now as you can guess, simply go inside of the "fail" folder and there will be another folder called "gnome-thumbnail-factory". Go inside that as well and simply press "Ctrl" + "A" keys and delete them all.

Now close the window and enter the folder/location which Nautilus refused to generate any thumbnails... now when you enter it... it should give you those beautiful looking picture previews, at last :D. Enjoy it!.

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Ext2Read, Read All Your "Ext2/3/4" GNU/Linux File Systems in Microsoft Windows!

Microsoft will never include the ability for their operating system to read GNU/Linux partitions by default. It's amazing what few years can bring. I remember, not that long ago, around 2004-2005, how hard it was to find something that can read "Ext" file systems in Microsoft windows.

Although a certain partition manager did come with a one but you had to pay a big price for the software.

Anyhow, if you dual boot with Microsoft Windows a GNU/Linux distribution that has a partition created using the "Ext/2/3 or the never 4" version, then Ext2Read is one of the totally free application that lets you read these GNU/Linux file systems under windows!.

You can even read LVM2 volumes as well. Not just copying/ files... but it supports mass folder copy.. etc too. But it can only read these file systems... it's not that it can't but I think the developers are a bit scared of letting you "Write" while on Widows since you can do some serious damage to the partition by doing so.

Still, if you want to copy a document or a folder that was in the "Home" folder, etc... then Ext2Read is very handy nonetheless. Get it from this official Ex2Read page. No need to install, just extract the .zip file and simply run the ".exe" file.

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