Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard broght us a new feature called “Cover Flow”, which allows you to quick preview your files in Finder without opening them one by one. Well, as for Ubuntu 9.04 users, you can now try Gloobus, it takes Mac’s quicklook feature to the linux world.

Gloobus is an extension of Gnome designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file. 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 this’ 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.

Currently, Gloobus supports TXT , PDF, JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG, PSD, MP3, OGG, MPG, WMV, XCF It has a sleek black interface which will put your files in focus.

TualatriX (author of Ubuntu Tweak) setted up a Gloobus PPA yesterday, which enables you to install Gloobus on your Ubuntu 9.04 desktop quickly and easily. If you’re running Ubuntu 9.04, follow the following instructions:

1) Add these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list (sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list)

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/gloobus/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/tualatrix/gloobus/ubuntu jaunty main

2) Add the key (if you have enanabled Ubuntu Tweak Launchpad PPA, skip this step)

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 0624A220

3) Update the packages list

sudo apt-get update

4) Upgrade to the latest patched Nautilus

sudo apt-get upgrade

5) Install Gloobus-Preview

sudo apt-get install gloobus-preview

6) Finally, quit and restart nautilus

nautilus -q
nautilus &

Now, select a file or a folder on your desktop or your file manager, and press Space, a Gloobus-Preview windows will be launched with the quicklook of the folder or file content. Enjoy!

Last night, I installed Gloobus on my desktop, it’s really amazing, Gloobus-Preview windows has a black interface, my gnome theme and blog theme are black too, it looks so cool! I’m listening a MP3, but I don’t need to open it by any music player now… it’s really amazing….

Well, when I was browsing my photo album I found this fake Ubuntu ads by Bill Gates, which was uploaded 2 years ago. When at that time, I installed Ubuntu 6.06 in my hardisk with Windows XP in my office computer. It’s for me for the 1st time to try Linux in the real sense.

While now, although Bill Gates recommended Ubuntu, I prefer Fedora much more…:smile: and will not switch back to Ubuntu, never!