A new, revamped sidebar has been added to the latest Nautilus Elementary 2.30 (only available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx).

There are now 3 categories in the sidebar: Personal, Devices and Network, each getting an expander - Rhythmbox style.

The state of the expanders are saved so if you collapsed a category and close nautilus, next time you'll open it, the category would be collapsed.

The "Desktop" shortcut in the Nautilus sidebar has also been removed. But you can add it by dragging and dropping a desktop shortcut directly onto the sidebar.


The Nautilus Elementary PPA has been updated and it now includes the revamped sidebar. You can install it (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx only) using the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:am-monkeyd/nautilus-elementary-ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

When we told you about some discussions on changing some default application in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10, Banshee was only being discussed. But today the blueprint for UNE default app selection changed and it now confirms Banshee as being evaluated for becoming default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10. Of course, this doesn't confirm Banshee as default yet, but it does mean that there are some chances to see it in UNE 10.10 as the "unified media player" we were talking about.

To be able to get included in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10, Banshee still needs some tweaks. It is even considered to use Meego Banshee interface instead of the default Banshee.

Z is a simple bash script which attempts to make the "cd" command smart, by creating a database of the most used as well as recently used directories (think of it as a simplified Zeitgeist written in BASH, for the "cd" command only) - it basically combines frequency and recency ("frecency") so you can get to the desired folder a lot faster.

It seems there's a lot of competition between the Linux docks lately, each adding feature after feature.

After AWN got a new style called Lucido (AWN will also get Zeitgeist integration soon), Cairo Dock announced a new systray (or notification area) which you can preview in the video below:

A Google Summer of Code project about NotifyOSD notification was recently brought up for discussion in the Ayatana mailing list. Unfortunately Mark Shuttleworth dismissed almost all the ideas related to NotifyOSD's behavior.

Mark agrees making a GUI you can use to set up the persistence time, UI modifications over a basic structure, font size/style, but that's it.

Here's what Mark Shuttleworth says about 'stacking' (make the bubbles dock downwards as they are initiated and start to stack up as the bubble times finish away) or a close button on NotifyOSD:

Update: you can nowinstall AWN Lucido from the AWN main PPA

Last week we told you about an easy way to configure NotifyOSD notification bubbles in Ubuntu (finally!). But you still had to modify a text file.

2 projects started already to create a GUI for this patched NotifyOSD. I tried compiling them and only one worked so I'm going to tell you how to compile / use it (it's very easy).

Before installing the graphical user interface to customize NotifyOSD, firstly make sure you add the PPA with the patched NotifyOSD (see here).

I just tried an old how-to we wrote about using Adium themes in Pidgin and it works just fine in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx but it's probably not that easy for new Ubuntu users to set everything up and for this reason I've created a very simple script which does everything automatically.

A new big change is being discussed on the Ayatana mailing list: single click for opening files and folders in Ubuntu (not Kubuntu - which already uses single click for opening files and folders). In fact there are 2 separate threads: one about defaulting to single click for opening file and folders and another to use a single-click mode for all GNOME applications - but only the first one seems to be seriously taken into consideration. The rationale behind this is: