Installation and thoughts about Gloobus file preview

Posted on February 23, 2010 | Category: File Formats, Images, Informational, Installing, Kubuntu, Linux, Linux Distributions, Resources, Reviews, Ubuntu, Xubuntu

Gloobus is a file preview extension for the Gnome Desktop Environment. Sorry KDE fans, this is not for you. As you may have noticed, not all filetypes in Gnome have a thumbnail preview. This is where Gloobus comes in handy. It currently supports preview mode for around 40 different file types.

Images: jpeg / png / icns / bmp / svg / gif / psd / xcf
Documents: pdf / cbr / cbz / doc / xls / odf / ods / odp / ppt
Source: c++ / c# / java / javascript / php / xml / log / sh / python
Audio: mp3 / ogg / midi / 3gp / wav
Video: mpg /avi / ogg / 3gp / mkv / flv
Other: folders / ttf / srt / plain-text

Installation

The easiest method of installation in Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) is the following.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gloobus-dev/gloobus-preview
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install gloobus-preview

During my installation, I noticed that my gloobus-preview installation required 172MB of new software, which was comprised of several open-office packages that I had previously remove to make room for Oo 3.2. A few caveats about this software. Viewing the previews of a file is not as straight forward as it may seem.

Screenshots

Gloobus preview for an .xml file

Gloobus preview for a .pdf

Gloobus configuration settings

Thoughts

There are two options for viewing file previews. The first option of right-clicking a file and selecting “Preview” did not function for my installation. There was not a preview option on the right-click menu. The second option of viewing the preview is to depress the space bar while hovering over the file. In actuality, the file has to be selected in Nautilus, then you can depress the space bar. I have the single-click file selection set on Nautilus, so that if I click the file to select it for preview, it will open.

I have to say, why couldn’t I just open the file? System resources and processor time? Yeah, ok. The preview is a great option for someone, but not me. I am not sure why you would want to create an extra step in looking at a file, when you could just open it. Now, if Gloobus had a slider so that images and files could be previewed and slid across the screen, I could see a benefit of not having to open up every application under the sun to view a variety of filetypes.

Gloobus Wiki | Gloobus Homepage