Linux Mint: Selective deletion of entries in Recent Files

If you really use the recent files menu in Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon, there are times when your menu gets flooded with files that you don’t want there. Like when you are browsing photos and all of a sudden all you see in your menu is photos. Now the stuff you really need is buried under the not so important photos. Follow this procedure to clear up the menu..

The Recent Files in the cinnamon menu looks like this:

From this, for whatever reason, I would like to remove the final.jpg entry. I do not want to clear the list completely as I use it to revisit files.

Open up terminal and cd to ~/.local/share

$ cd ~/.local/share

Now use vi to open the recently-used.xbel file

$ vi recently-used.xbel

The recently-used.xbel file consists of bookmarks that the cinnamon menu uses to display the recent files. All we have to do is remove the <Bookmark></Bookmark> blocks pertaining to the file we need to delete from our menu.

In my case the lines look like this:

  <bookmark href="file:///home/shaik/Pictures/final.jpg" added="2015-12-14T13:56:01Z" modified="2015-12-14T13:56:01Z" visited="2015-12-14T13:56:05Z">
    <info>
      <metadata owner="http://freedesktop.org">
        <mime:mime-type type="image/jpeg"/>
        <bookmark:groups>
          <bookmark:group>Graphics</bookmark:group>
        </bookmark:groups>
        <bookmark:applications>
          <bookmark:application name="Image Viewer" exec="&apos;eog %u&apos;" modified="2015-12-14T13:56:01Z" count="1"/>
        </bookmark:applications>
      </metadata>
    </info>
  </bookmark>

Locate the bookmark with your filename and delete that whole bookmark block. You can do this by hitting dd on the line to be deleted. To delete multiple lines hit <number_of_lines>dd. For example if your bookmark is 15 lines long 15dd on the start of the particular bookmark tag should delete the whole block.

Save the file with the wq command and exit vi editor.

Now opening up the recent files in the cinnamon menu should show you the files sans the one that you deleted.

 

 

Linux Mint: Changing default application when not listed in “Open With”

Linux Mint 15. I had manually installed the Adobe Acrobat reader after downloading the deb package from the Acrobat reader website. Everything went smoothly until I tried to open pdf files. Coming from Windows I assumed that when I installed a program if the default program to open the file was not set I could get into the file properties and select the default program. So I opened up Nautilus and found a .pdf file in the file system. Right clicked on the pdf file and selected properties. Getting into the “Open With” tab Mint shows me all the options that I have BUT the Acrobat reader that I installed is nowhere to be found. This maybe because of the fact that it was not installed from the software manager.

If you ever come across this problem with any program you installed, you need to look at for the desktop file for that program. This file is usually generated for all installed programs and is typically stored in the /usr/share/applications directory. For acrobat reader it is named AdobeReader.desktop. So open up a terminal window and type in

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/AdobeReader.desktop

You will be asked for the root password to edit this file. Look for the line that says

Exec=

This will have the value of the command that is executed to start this program. In the case of Acrobat this is

Exec=acroread

To make the program name show up in the “Open With” tab of file properties, add the %f argument to this command. So now your Exec should read

Exec=acroread %f

Save the file and exit. Right click on the file whose default program you want to change. Select the “open with” tab and now you should see your application listed. Select it as the default application and click close. And that should be it.

By the way, if you are wondering what all that stuff in the .desktop file means you can have a look at the specifications right here:

http://www.nautilus-actions.org/?q=node/377

Hope this helped.

Installing eclipse on Linux Mint

Download the eclipse tar.gz package from eclipse download site. I am using a 32 bit machine so I downloaded the latest 32 bit eclipse package namely eclipse-jee-juno-SR2-linux-gtk.tar.gz

For me it downloaded into the /home//Downloads directory.

Unzip the package using package manager into the current directory. You should now have a directory called eclipse that contains all the eclipse files

open up a terminal

Switch user to root. You will require your root password to do this

su

Change directory to the directory that contains the eclipse directory

cd /home/Downloads/

Move the eclipse directory into the /opt/ directory

mv eclipse /opt/

Now create a desktop file at /usr/share/applications

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop

Copy the following into the file and save

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Eclipse
Type=Application
Exec=/opt/eclipse/eclipse
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Comment=Integrated Development Environment
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;IDE
Name[en]=eclipse.desktop

create a symlink in /usr/local/bin

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo ln -s /opt/eclipse/eclipse

Since eclipse has been installed in a directory that has root privileges you will need to go to the configurations directory of eclipse and change the permissions for the files there so all users can have access to the program

cd /opt/eclipse/configurations
chmod -R g+rwx .

If you do not perform the last step you may receive this error when running eclipse

Locking is not possible in the directory “{IM_HOME}/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi”. A common reason is that the file system or Runtime Environment does not support file locking for that location. Please choose a different location, or disable file locking passing “-Dosgi.locking=”none” as a VM argument. {IM_HOME}/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/.manager/.fileTableLock (Permission denied).

Now check to see that eclipse shows up in your Mint menu under programming. If it doesn’t right click on the menu button and select Edit Menu and you should be able to add it in the dialog that shows up. You may need to restart cinnamon after applying the changes.

References:

http://akovid.blogspot.in/2012/08/installing-eclipse-juno-42-in-ubuntu.html
https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21455334