[HOWTO] QuickTip: Dolphin prefs are forgotten

With the move to Linux Mint I discovered that my settings in Dolphin, the KDE file manager I prefer, don’t seem to want to get remembered. It’s not just from session to session or even from directory to directory but I can change the preferences, close the dialog and try to use the newly set setting. I found it mostly for getting the Delete option on the content menu (Settings > Configure Dolphin > General > Context Menu > Show ‘Delete’ command). I don’t know if the issue arose when I changed my distro from Kubuntu to Mint and tried to migrate some of my settings or not, although I do recall specifically not moving the ~/.kde directory or any of it’s subdirectories over when I performed the install.

I’ve tried looking for info on this off and on but today I finally saw something in the KDE UserBase that turned out to resolve the issue. Under Hints, Tips and Troubleshooting I found this:

• Problem: Dolphin’s menu entries ‘View – Additional’ and/or ‘View – Panels’ don’t have any options. Nepomuk is enabled in System Settings.
• Solution: Rename the folder ‘~/.kde4/share/apps/dolphin’ and restart dolphin. This will purge your dolphin customizations but the entries should be back. If everything works as expected you can then delete the folder. This happened to me after an upgrade from KDE 4.4 to 4.5

Sure enough, I renamed ~/.kde/share/apps/dolphin to ~/.kde/share/apps/dolphin_borked (note the path is different from what the UserBase shows), restarted Dolphin, and am finally able to get a persistent Delete option under Move to Trash on the context menu.

Now if I could only figure out how to get the authorization dialog to open above the current window while doing things like installing or removing packages with KPackageKit. It’s a real pain to have to pull the dialog on top, especially if I haven’t moved out of the window that’s prompting the request for my password in the first place.

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Snagging web videos has gotten even easier

One thing I do on a daily basis is snag videos I find online to carry with me on my digital media player (DMP). Usually it’s just weather reports from my local CBS affiliate or highlights from Dodger games but every now and then I find a video that I just have to put on my DMP. It may be a videosong from Pomplamoose or a Tiny Desk Concert from NPR, or it may just be a cool or humorous video I’ve come across in my browsing. I used to use a very nice extension for GNOME’s Epiphany browser but when I switched to using Chromium there were a couple of add-ons I could use to snag YouTube videos. Then of course YouTube got wise to us and changed the layout of their website to break the downloaders. The Minitube devs were able to get a fix implemented to let us enjoy videos outside of our web browsers, and we can get a URI from Minitube to use to download the video, but that gets kind of convoluted.

About a month ago I found out about a program called ClipGrab, that lets people running Linux, Windows or the MacOS save and convert online videos so easily it’s almost indecent. I found about it through OMG! Ubuntu’s Facebook feed.

I didn’t blog about it sooner because I wanted to hold off on blogging it until I had a chance to use it more before I wrote what might be an incomplete review. It’s not a perfect solution because I can’t use it to snag my local weather reports or MLB highlights, nor can I use it to snag Facebook vids or clips for NBC shows, like one I’d love to be able to snag.

To install it you can download installers for OpenSUSE, Windows Vista and XP, and the MacOS from the ClipGrab download page, plus they have source code for the three platforms. The ClipGrab team has also set up a PPA for Ubuntu users, which is how I installed it on Mint. (And yes, it works beautifully under KDE, as my screencaps show.) The instructions for adding it to your software sources is in the OMG! Ubuntu! article.

Once you have ClipGrab installed simply launch it. If you’ve already copied the URI for the page a video you want to download can be found you can simply paste it into the text box below the blue bar but if you launch ClipGrab before copying the URI the software make it even easier for you. Let’s say you want to snag the video about a fan of the progrock band Yes who tries to turn one person onto the band only to find his entire campus is becoming Yes fans. Copy the URI from the address bar and you’ll get a notification pop-up from the ClipGrab icon in your system tray.

Simply click on that icon and ClipGrab will load that URI into it’s location field and get the name of the video and what levels of quality it’s available in. Select the format you want to save it as and the quality level you want and click Grab this clip! A file picker window will open to let you specify where you want it saved and what name you want it saved as. You don’t have to specify the extension as ClipGrab will add that automatically. If you add it yourself you will end up with two extensions, such as All Good People.mp4.mp4. Whoops!

ClipGrab version 3.0.7.2 supports videos on YouTube, Clipfish, Collegehumor, Dailymotion, and five other sites (the complete list is on the About ClipGrab page), but it may be able to snag a video from other sites as well. Simply give the URI to ClipGrab and see if it can recognize how to get the video. It can also download HD videos from sites that support high definition videos, so you may be able to use it on more sites than you realize.

For saving the videos ClipGrab supports not only MPEG4 and WMV video formats, but it can also save Ogg Theora videos, Ogg Vorbis audio files and MP3 files.

Thanks to the good folks over at OMG! Ubuntu! for letting me know about this very cool application.

Greetings from Linux Mint!

Last month I tried to install Linux Mint 9 KDE but couldn’t when it turned out to need a blank DVD to burn the live disk (for trying and installing Mint) and I created two coasters once I found where the our blank DVDs disappeared to. I ended up going with Kubuntu 10.04 to move from using a GNOME-based system to a desktop that uses KDE, but it turns out that once I got Kubuntu installed and tweaked I wasn’t finished with mods to my computer.

Being disabled I have a very fixed income and am unable to simply go out and get a new computer every few years. Luckily I have a pair of friends who do manage to get new computers every few years and when they get a new computer the old one move their way down through the two of them and I get the older system. It doesn’t work out too badly for me because the computer I end up getting is always an upgrade from what I use at the time, plus I’ve gotten hard drives and other components out of their upgrades.

As I was getting Kubuntu set up on my machine one of my friends’ computers died, kicking off yet another round of computer upgrades. I’m usually happy when I get news of an upgraded computer but this time the timing sucked since I was just getting Kubuntu where I liked it and I’d have to see about moving hard drives, as well as a video card and my sound card, into the new case. (My other friend’s computer also had enough problems that they were able to pass along a computer to another one of their friends who really needed one.)

In the process of moving hard drives over, and realigning how I used my partitions, I screwed up my system enough that I ended up simply doing a fresh install. This time around I had a USB flash drive and was able to install Linux Mint 9 KDE. (Mint is based on Ubuntu, for those who aren’t aware of it.) I had some crashes of the Mint installer as I tried to set up the partitions on my hard drives to let Mint know what was where and how to use it, but after manually deleting files on a pair of partitions I wanted to have Mint format I was finally able to get it installed.

The installation process was faster than I had with Ubuntu or Kubuntu, and once I booted up my new Mint system I was amazed at how many things were already installed. Mint is known for creating a distro that really is ready to use as soon as you get it installed, and I didn’t have to hunt down codecs to enjoy audio, video or even web content, with even Adobe Reader installed in the initial install. It even had Miro installed for me, although I did have to manually install Chromium. Mint uses the combination of Firefox and Thunderbird for browsing and email and not the KDE defaults of Konqueror and Kontact, but it’s easy enough to make sure I had the apps I wanted to use installed. (Songbird is also included in the base install, and I’m killing that app as well since I never use it.) Unfortunately Mint did install a handful of languages for Firefox that I have absolutely no need for, but it was easy to remove them from Firefox’s Addons dialog.

I was glad I had written several posts about tweaking KDE and getting apps I use working so I was able to get my hands on info I needed to regain most of my desired settings. Part of this was because of the very good advice I had gotten before to not use the configuration files from one Linux distribution with another so I created a new user account for Mint and selectively copied data over for third-party apps I knew would be able to use the old config files, with ownership and permissions changed as needed, of course. The biggest help I got from a blog post was from a post I wrote knowing full well I would need the information handy after I moved from Kubuntu to Mint. I had already created a list of the packages I had installed on Kubuntu. After making some manual changes to remove packages I knew I wouldn’t need, like old kernels and some apps I decided wouldn’t make the distro change, I was able to get the entire batch of apps reinstalled with very minimal input from the user. I did have to respond to some prompts, like for getting Apache and MySQL installed but that was about it out of a list of over 1700 packages. (I may remove some of those that end up being unneeded at some point.)

One place I’m disappointed in Mint about is their software management app. They’ve tweaked Ubuntu’s Software Center app and it’s not a horrible way to install software. Unlike KPackageKit it gives you a better starting point with its twelve software categories, but once you get into the details of a software title you’re on a page which I can only call rather ugly in its plainness. Of course you can still use KPackageKit or the command line to install software, or even Synaptic is you install it first.

I did run into one problem after getting Mint installed. After I got the NVIDIA drivers installed for my graphics card I noticed that my initial splash screen, part of Plymouth, was blank except for the five “progress bar” dots. I had already seen that it’s a known issue for some users and was able to follow the directions on this tutorial to get it fixed. The only other real problem I’m having at this point is that I had Yakuake start at login but I started it hidden away on Kubuntu and now I haven’t been able to track down how to do that again. If you know how please let me know in the comments.

A new problem that cropped up after yesterday’s updates is the fact that compositing keeps crashing on me. I’ll have to try to chase down why that’s happening and get it fixed. Luckily I did add a plasmoid to my panel to toggle compositing without having to use the hotkey (Alt-Shift-F12) although having to deal with it several times a day is a pain in the keister. Updated 4:54pm: I think I found the culprit. I went to System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced and checked the Disable functionality checks box. After doing that I haven’t had a crash in three hours, after multiple instances in a half hour this morning.

Before I close this post I’m going to include a pair of screenshots I made for the Ubuntu Forums’ October desktop screenshot thread.

Clean

Dirty

For those wanting details:

• OS: Linux Mint 9 KDE with KDE 4.5.1
• Style: Oxygen
• Workspace theme: Blend
• Colors: Oxygen Cold
• Icons: Mint-KDE
• Wallpaper: Kayla, an image Webilder found for me on Flickr back in August