» Playing With Clutter Johns Blog

Some of you out there might be familiar with Gloobus. Over the last few nights I spent some time integrating Gloobus inside nautilus.

This is a proof of concept. I have done very little so far - it shows the first 8 files in the directory, and allows you to navigate between them with animation. It is mostly just a port of Gloobus from C++ into a ClutterGroup derived Actor in C, most of the thanks should go to the Gloobus author.

It features the same bugs as Gloobus, like poor support for resizing the window, positioning bugs, and it does not scale to very many files. It also leaks like a sieve (that one’s on me). Here is my inadequacy represented in video form.

Those of you who regularly work with computers and other technology will be aware of how important it is to have a good quality internet connection. If you are looking into getting a new broadband connection then I recommend you look at O2 uk broadband reviews.

However, if you would still like to take a look and perhaps fix all the bugs, the steps for testing it are

Install clutter-gtk-0.9
Download nautilus from my Git repository (the clutter branch)
https://github.com/nzjrs/nautilus/tree
Build the test program
cd src/file-manager
make -f Makefile.covflow && ./test-covflow
Built nautilus with –enable-clutter-view
Run the newly build nautilus
cd src
./nautilus -q
./nautilus –no-desktop

This is very early work so the standard disclaimers apply. I needed to get this off my chest so I could get back to PhD work.

17 Responses to “Playing With Clutter”

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1 Kevin DeKorte May 28, 2009 at 2:20 am

John,

I also have been playing with clutter and the desktop. You can see the thing I have been toying with here

http://kdekorte.blogspot.com/search/label/ClutterDesk
2 Chris Lord May 28, 2009 at 5:14 am

Cool, but the reflections aren’t quite right (they’re see-through when what they’re reflecting isn’t) - instead of making them semi-transparent to let the background show through, you could use cogl_polygon, and use the vertex colour to give it a black tint. You could even then give it a gradient to make it less reflective at the bottom of the texture, making it even more ‘realistic’
3 John Stowers May 28, 2009 at 10:00 am

@Chris:

It should be a little better now. We are using a translucent black texture instead of just changing the opacity.
4 Pierre May 30, 2009 at 6:25 am

I’m havin trouble checking out your repo.

$ git clone git://github.com/nzjrs/nautilus.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/pierre/Desktop/nzjrs-nautilus-105c8937fe9a1f8bc1ae54ac9c4cd427cadb3200/src/file-manager/nautilus/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 105653, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (17920/17920), done.
remote: Total 105653 (delta 87714), reused 105344 (delta 87473)
Receiving objects: 100% (105653/105653), 96.40 MiB | 303 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (87714/87714), done.
warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

Also, is it possible to give more detailed instructions as to how compile nautilus with that flag ?
5 John Stowers May 30, 2009 at 8:11 pm

@Pierre: You have to check out the clutter branch.

Detailed instructions will follow when it is in a more stable shape
6 Pierre May 31, 2009 at 12:07 am

Ok. I created a step by step guide with more steps.
https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/gloobus/+question/72720
I’ll be glad to update it with more instructions.
For now I’ll keep looking for bug in Gloobus trunk
7 PierreS June 5, 2009 at 10:53 pm

I got Gloobus-Nautilus working thanks to Jordi’s instructions and yours.
https://answers.edge.launchpad.net/gloobus
Here are thus some updated instructions for: Gloobus-Nautilus, Gloobus-Preview and Gloobus-Coverflow
Let me know if they work well (or not)
8 Livio June 6, 2009 at 1:56 am

I wonder if Gloobus would be a places-like pane inside Nautilus…

Nautilus should have more flexible interface and plugin APi/ABI.
9 steveacab August 24, 2009 at 9:51 pm

I have some problems with “make” nautilus git.

The problem is than it stop at nautilus-private folder.

I follow the instructions but nothing.

P.s. I have installed any dependencies.
10 steveacab August 25, 2009 at 4:01 am

Can you upload the tarball in another site?

Are 3 hours than I try to download to git but nothing!

remote: Counting objects: 105996, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (18150/18150), done.
remote: Total 105996 (delta 87989), reused 105485 (delta 87586)
Receiving objects: 100% (105996/105996), 96.45 MiB | 484 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (87989/87989), done.
warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.
11 lean August 30, 2009 at 5:05 pm

I got the same

warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

problem with the git and checkout origin/clutter didn’t work either.

So ended up downloading the files with wget or from a tar can’t remember now, but get clutter-black-texture.c errors.

Does this have to run with clutter 0.9 because I can’t install that it throws dependancy errors and the only versions in available in my apt-sources are version 0.8 and 1.0 which I have installed as well as gloobus-preview. I can’t install Gloobus due to its depending on clutter 0.9
12 punkerfrancais September 22, 2009 at 3:48 am

Hey..

Well well well. After some hours… my clutter integration in nautilus is end but, unfortunaly, it is really so buggy on my machine.

I have this error when I am trying to browse my folders in the panel:
** (nautilus:27345): CRITICAL **: clutter_cover_flow_clear: assertion `CLUTTER_IS_COVER_FLOW(coverflow)’ failed
Erreur de segmentation

(and equally when I am trying to launch one of the clutter icons).

I only can see the animation between icons, on the right. If I return on the left, I cannot continue to see precedents icons, strange .

But, other stupid problem, when I change view for ‘icons’ or ‘list’, It crash

So bad. Can you help me? Only a thing… I had problems with library :

libclutter-gtk-0.9.so.0: cannot open shared object file

So, I have installed : libclutter-gtk-0.8-dev and by the next, It was good (I don’t understand ’cause I had libclutter-gtk-0.9-dev and I was thinking it was enought).

If anyone have a idea… don’t hesitate :-))) ! thank you

PS: thank for this project, I am impatient about a final version in the future
13 AlexAnteMachina September 24, 2009 at 2:40 am

Hi!
I just had a look at the Gloobus demo-video and was very impressed.
It looks really nice!
Is there a chance having it working with Thunar, too? Nautilus is nice, but too “heavy” for our Distribution.

In Case you could make it work with Thunar, maybe we would include it to Elive by default!

Thanks!

alex
14 iGer February 4, 2010 at 5:25 pm

I love this but i am noob in Linux you can explicate the steps for install this app , please i dont understand how install the group of “tar.bz ” please help a newbie Linux user