Cover Thumbnailer - How to install in Ubuntu Linux

Cover Thumbnailer is a small Python script which displays music/video album covers in Nautilus in place of ordinary icons of folders, preview of pictures in a folder and more.

It is similar to what you see in Microsoft Windows 7 where the folder shows a preview of the pictures contained in it.

This is for Ubuntu users running v 9.10 Karmic, v 10.04 Lucid and v 10.10 Maverick .

Open your terminal and enter the following set of commands :

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flozz/flozz$ sudo apt-get update$ sudo apt-get install cover-thumbnailer
Once Cover Thumbnailer has been installed, you will have to restart Nautilus by running the following command. $ nautilus -q
Now the specified folders containing music files will display the respective album cover / mosaic of covers.

If you are using another Linux distribution, you can download the source code from the Cover Thumbnailer website, compile it, and install it on your machine.

Cover Thumbnailer program will store a cache of cropped images of albums in a  hidden folder named .thumbnails/ in your home directory. The .thumbnails/ directory is a cache directory created by GNOME when you browse through your folders in Nautilus. It contains thumbnail pictures of images you have previously viewed.

And when you visit a particular music folder, the thumbnail of the respective album is shown on top of the folder.

You can access the Cover Thumbnailer preferences via GNOME Menu > System > Preferences > Cover Thumbnailer. Here you can specify more folders that can avail of Cover Thumbnailer's services and set many other options such as clearing the thumbnail cache and more.

Here is how the folders looks after you install cover thumbnailer program in Ubuntu. Cover Thumbnailer in action in Nautilus

Ubuntu Might Ship With Qt Libraries

In future iterations of Ubuntu (Natty and onwards), Ubuntu CD might ship with Qt libraries - Mark Shuttleworth noted in one of his blog post.

The basic premise behind this announcement is that it is the quality and usability of the application (to be included) that is important; the choice of toolkit should be irrelevant.

Ubuntu till date have shown a bias towards applications built on Gtk toolkit. Currently, almost all applications that are shipped with Ubuntu are GNOME centric. And if a user needs a Qt based application the recourse is to manually install it from the Ubuntu repository.

However, this is going to change in the future.

Mark Shuttleworth further suggests a procedure (see flowchart below) to decide what applications will go into a default Ubuntu install.

He further clarifies that Qt applications should not be confused with KDE apps. And if KDE applications are to be included in a default Ubuntu install, they should be able to interact with the dconf system configuration. Unfortunately, as of now, this is difficult as Gtk apps all use a centrally-manageable preferences store, and KDE apps do things differently.

[Source : Mark Shuttleworth]