GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 129015
Properties on the "Computer" item don't make sense
Last modified: 2012-07-20 14:01:37 UTC
Right-clicking the "Computer" icon on the desktop, and selecting properties should probably give a dialog with system information like CPU mhz, RAM, kernel and GNOME versions etc instead of the standard file properties dialog which is fairly useless in this case.
This is a sort of arbitrary priority assignment on my part, but I agree with Jorn that this looks pretty funky.
Created attachment 25927 [details] [review] The attachment is the patch file for fm-properties-window.c After the patch is appended to the fm-properties-window.c the computer properties will show details about the CPU,Kernal details,Syatem name etc. I think this makes sense instead of the earlier computer properties.
I only glanced very quickly at the patch, but I have some comments: The indentation doesn't follow the nautilus style guide. You can't just compare the name for "Computer". Other files may have that name, and the name is translated. Hardcoded linux-specific code in the general nautilus code. This is a no-no. "Kernal" is misspelled. What if you bring up properties for Computer and several other items? create_basic_page changes doesn't follow the should_show_foo style of the rest of the function. Why not? Just showing all the content of /proc/cpuinfo seems to not be what people want. Who cares about vendorid and cache size. Also, i don't think we want the permissions and emblem pages. In fact, we might want the dialog to be completely different for computer. More like a generic "show info about the computer" dialog.
Created attachment 26613 [details] [review] The attachment is the patch for fm-properties-window.c Care has been taken to follow the indentation according to nautilus style guide. The comparison now is not with "Computer".Even If there is a file or folder named Computer the properties wont be affected.Create basic page follows the should_show_foo style in this patch.The permissions and emblems page is also not present.
babymathew100@rediffmail.com: please send your patch, a link to this bug, and any news on your progress on the patch to nautilus-list@gnome.org where it can be reviewed. Thanks.
babymathew100@rediffmail.com: and attaching a screenshot of what the dialog looks like with your patch is extremely helpful too.
*** Bug 305032 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
babymathew: Sorry for the long delay. We're UI frozen for Nautilus 2.12, so this will unfortunately not be incorporated. A fix for this issue has good chances of being included in Nautilus 2.14, though. While I - and an IRC discussion revealed that Martin shares my opinion - like the general idea of changing the first properties tab based on the type of the displayed file (launchers, computer, volumes, drive), I don't think the architecture we currently have is suitable this. We shouldn't mess around with that many nested if branches for now. We'll in contrast have to write some new helpers which determine when a particular field will be shown, or instead let the first page be constructed by totally different helpers based on the file type. We have to iron out how the internal codepath looks before committing anything, though.
*** Bug 140652 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Are you planing to include patch for making useful computer and volume properties dialogs into nautilus 2.15/2.16 ?
The patch should be rewritten to include information gathered from HAL, rather than getting it in a Linux-specific way from /proc/cpuinfo
A very different approach: why not simply launch (or bring to front) gnome-system-monitor when the user selects properties of the "Computer", rather than try to reimplement this all in Nautilus. The "-s" option will show the system tab.
Nautilus by default does not draw the desktop anymore in GNOME3. Plus this is probably shown now under “System Settings > System Info”?
André is right. Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. However, you are using a version that is too old and not supported anymore. GNOME developers are no longer working on that version, so unfortunately there will not be any bug fixes for the version that you use. By upgrading to a newer version of GNOME you could receive bug fixes and new functionality. You may need to upgrade your Linux distribution to obtain a newer version of GNOME. Please feel free to reopen this bug if the problem still occurs with a newer version of GNOME.