Quick Tip: Speed Up File Transfers to External Storage

Image via Wikipedia

These days, you might often copy a video file over to an external drive so that you can take that drive to someone's house. The process can run quite slowly if you drag the video file into the destination drive's window but don't close it. Why is that?

In GNOME, Nautilus is trying to create a preview of the video file every time the file changes ... which is constantly. ;) Nautilus is therefore constantly pulling data from your drive and using CPU to create a thumbnail that will be discarded the next second. Since the bus is probably already saturated with outgoing data, Nautilus is causing all kinds of problems there.

Close the drive's window, and Nautilus won't do that, saving time and energy.

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Shock and Horror!

Shock and horror! Windows 7 sometimes misidentifies hardware and assigns generic drivers which don't unlock all the features of the hardware, leaving, for example, Ed Bott without a working microphone and no way to get mutli-touch, even with the correct drivers.

Ed Bott also doesn't like the new icon-only taskbar, so he re-enables text+icons.  It took him months to get used to the default icon combination strategy, instead of the "combine when taskbar is full" method he was used to from Vista.

What about the file manager? Well, it now has an "insistence on using namespaces that aren’t tied to a hierarchy with some sort of disk device at the top." Does that sound familiar to anyone? It replaces this with Libraries, making the sidebar look remarkably like another OS I know of. If you thought I meant Nautilus, I was actually talking about OS X, but either OS will work. Bott says that Windows users will need to be trained to use Libraries because they represent an "initial conceptual hurdle of understanding."

Some (very few, apparently) of your legacy programs may not run in Windows 7 so you'll need to use a virtual machine running XP with some shared folders in order to get around that. Luckily, it has seamless mode, also available in VirtualBox.

This may have sounded like a rant against Windows 7 or even Ed Bott. It was no such thing. In fact, I am going to praise Ed. His opinion of Windows 7 is that it could probably be released as ready right now. "From a features and capabilities point of view, Windows 7 is essentially done." His final judgement?

Overall, I’m impressed with how reliable this Windows release has been. It also seems more than adequate in terms of performance. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to measure speeds and feeds, but overall, every common operation in Windows 7 feels snappy and responsive, even on old hardware. I haven’t seen significant changes in startup and shutdown times over Windows Vista on the same hardware.

How did he come to this conclusion with so much that's different and so much that needed tweaking?

Instead of that conventional review approach, I want to share my experiences after six months of using Windows 7 full time. My attitude over that six months has been to keep an open mind, learn how the operating system works, and incorporate its features into my work style. If you’re planning to evaluate Windows 7, I urge you to try the same approach: Keep an open mind, try to figure out how it works, and see if maybe some small changes in old work habits can pay big dividends in productivity.

Thank you, Ed Bott, for taking the time to review an OS properly. I wish more reviewers did that.

Fix Your Crap 1: Want Tracker Support in Nautilus?

Image by gigasoft via Flickr

Open up your Ubuntu Hardy (or later version) file manager and press CTRL+F to start a search. You'll notice that it's slow and only searches by name. Sure, you've got the deskbar (unless you're using a recent version of Ubuntu) and can get Tracker full text search, but why wouldn't you want Tracker integrated with Nautilus? Well, it turns out that a lot of people didn't want it and the integration was stopped after Gutsy (what a bone-headed decision that was!). Don't bother trying to report this as a bug, even though the Nautilus project and the Tracker project both claim integration with each other -- it'll just be marked "Invalid" or "Won't fix." Wake up. Modern desktops have this kind of integration.

So what's a person to do? Are you going to run off to another Gnome distro which doesn't do this? You have the power of the source. Use the source, Luke! Fix your crap. It's an easy cut and paste job for you. Just open a terminal and paste the following in (I'll explain later what each part does):

sudo apt-get build-dep nautilus
sudo apt-get install build-essential libtrackerclient-dev \
libtracker-gtk-dev fakeroot
apt-get source -b nautilus
sudo dpkg -i libnautilus-extension*.deb nautilus*.deb
killall nautilus

You should now have a near-instant search via full-text Tracker. Have fun.

The explanation

1. We're going to need to recompile nautilus, so we need to get the build dependencies for Naultilus. The first line does this automatically without having to work through everything manually.
2. Since the Tracker dependencies weren't installed, we need to include those. We also need fakeroot since we don't want to build as root -- fakeroot is a package which keeps us from needing to use those priveledges while building the package. Build-essential makes sure that we have all the build tools installed. I normally have them, and I'm not sure whether you actually need to have this package on the second line or not (due to build-dep above), but it doesn't hurt to have it and I don't want anyone's build failing. The backslash in the middle of that line makes a carriage return possible without executing the command.
3. We retrieve the source for Nautilus and automatically build it. Since Nautilus checks for Tracker during compilation, we don't need to mess with any compilation flags -- that's handled automatically.
4. We install the new packages.
5. We need to kill Nautilus to restart it.

Sometimes, changing your system to meet your needs is more difficult than this. I'll introduce you to one of those next week in Fix Your Crap 2.

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