Arkham’s Eyrie

I’ve tried to use some kind of KDE like, bigger icons on my desktop for a while and I realized that it is really a pity to not use the wonderful 32×32 tango icons for the gnome menu also. If you want to try, it’s very simple:

gedit ~/.gtkrc-2.0

and put in this line:

gtk-icon-sizes = "panel-menu=32,32"

and restart gnome-panel (maybe you could be more gracious :P):

killall gnome-panel

Here is the outcome:

There are so many applications that depend on qt in my system (among others skype, vlc, opera, picard and virtualbox) that I decided to remove all the statically-compiled-against packages and just install the library and normal packages; this gave me also the chance to find a better way to integrate qt apps in a gnome-based desktop environment.

The problems that I noticed were that all the fonts looked really tiny and the overall look of the application was kinda poor, so I took a look at the binaries included in the qt package:

arkham ~  $  pacman -Ql qt | grep bin
qt /usr/bin/
qt /usr/bin/assistant
qt /usr/bin/assistant_adp
qt /usr/bin/designer
qt /usr/bin/linguist
qt /usr/bin/lrelease
qt /usr/bin/lupdate
qt /usr/bin/moc
qt /usr/bin/pixeltool
qt /usr/bin/qcollectiongenerator
qt /usr/bin/qdbus
qt /usr/bin/qdbuscpp2xml
qt /usr/bin/qdbusviewer
qt /usr/bin/qdbusxml2cpp
qt /usr/bin/qhelpconverter
qt /usr/bin/qhelpgenerator
qt /usr/bin/qmake
qt /usr/bin/qt3to4
qt /usr/bin/qtconfig
qt /usr/bin/rcc
qt /usr/bin/uic
qt /usr/bin/uic3

I tried with qtconfig and it solved the fonts problem, but the default styles still looked really bad; luckily, I found a project called QGtkStyle, that lets you use a gtk-rendered qt style, thus giving a native appearence for qt apps running on gnome. To install it, make sure to have qt4.4 and gtk2 installed correctly, then:

svn co "svn://labs.trolltech.com/svn/styles/gtkstyle"
cd gtkstyle/
qmake && make
sudo make install

or

yaourt -S qgtkstyle-svn

Now, from the qtconfig menu you can choose a new style called GTK, and I can assure you that this one looks really nice. Have fun

Nautilus “Open with” option and Mplayer don’t seem to behave correctly when the file we want to open contains spaces. The dirty hack to solve it is:

su
vi /usr/share/applications/mplayer.desktop

And replace “Exec=gmplayer %U” with “Exec=gmplayer %F”