Quick Previews In Gnome & Ubuntu With Gloobus [AMAZING!]

Gloobus is an extension of Gnome designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file. Gloobus currently supports the following files: TXT , PDF, JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, PSD, MP3, OGG, MPG, WMV, XCF. Finally I can preview PSD and XCF files :D.


Official Gloobus description:

Ever been annoyed by those tiny miniatures of your files that are helpless. Outraged by the fact that there's no miniature for half of the file formats you're using. Excruciated by the painful loading time to see if you're dealing with the right file? Hail to Gloobus, for tis' is the Holy Grail of preview! Designed as an extendable, standards-compliant previewer , so that it plays nice with Gnome and can be easily extended to support any kind of file, Gloobus enables instant previewing of your files, without even having to open them. Hit space, and BANG, here's the content of your file, displayed as it would if it was opened.

Before you get started with installing Gloobus, please take a look at the following 2 screencasts with Gloobus in action (I know you will most definetly want to install Gloobus after watching those...):

How to install Gloobus in Ubuntu and ArchLinux

1. Ubuntu PPA for Gloobus Preview

Run the following commands in a terminal:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/gloobus/ubuntu jaunty main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 0624A220

Then you can proceed to installing Gloobus Preview:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install gloobus-preview && sudo apt-get upgrade

The last upgrade is to upgrade the patched Nautilus.

And finally, you need to restart Nautilus:

nautilus -q

nautilus &

Update 02 January, 2010:
There are 2 new Gloobus repositories for Ubuntu Karmic (Lucid packages will probably be available soon too), for both Gloobus Preview and CoverGloobus. To add them, run the following commands in a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gloobus-dev/gloobus-preview
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gloobus-dev/covergloobus

And then to install both Gloobus Preview and CoverGloobus:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install covergloobus gloobus-preview 

2. Download Gloobus .DEB files for Ubuntu

In case you don't want to add the Gloobus repository, you can just download the Ubuntu .deb files for Gloobus preview:

• gloobus-preview_0.4.1-0~ppa4_amd64.deb (929.5 KiB)
• gloobus-preview_0.4.1-0~ppa4_i386.deb (848.1 KiB)

• nautilus_2.26.2-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb (1.2 MiB)
• nautilus_2.26.2-0ubuntu3_i386.deb (1.1 MiB)

• libnautilus-extension1_2.26.2-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb (60.9 KiB)
• libnautilus-extension1_2.26.2-0ubuntu3_i386.deb (59.4 KiB)

3. Ubuntu - Gloobus Preview + Coverflow -> the Gloobus Ubuntu repository doesn't come with Coverflow by default, but you can download both Gloobus Coverflow and Gloobus preview (thanks to buddy in the comments) from HERE (there are .deb files inside the archive).

4. Arch Linux download: from HERE.

Using Gloobus

Using Gloobus is very simple. Just select the file in Nautilus and hit the <SPACE> key.

If that doesn't work, you need to set the key bindings for Gloobus Preview. Open a terminal and paste (you can modify the key bindings below):

gconftool-2 -s --type string /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 "gloobus-preview"
gconftool-2 -s --type string /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 "<Control>space"

Or, if downloading the package from step 3 (see above), you can just run the configure-shortcut.sh script to set those.

To run the "Coverflow", in the archive downloaded at step 3, you should have some Nautilus actions scripts (they have .schemas extension). Go to System > Preferences > Nautilus Actions Configuration, click on "Import/Export" and import those files. You will then have "Coverflow" when right clicking files / folders in Nautilus. You can also import the Gloobus-Preview action for right click, if you wish an alternative for the key combination.

If you don't have Nautilus Actions installed:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

Update:

You may also want to try CoverGloobus, from the same author as Gloobus.