[Solved] Display Icons Not Thumbnails on Linux Mint

[White Phoenix]

I am running OpenOffice on Mint 21.1 with Cinnamon 5.6.8. Instead of icons in compact view the files display thumbnails which are useless for anything except images and videos. How do I get icons to show for OpenOffice files by default instead of doing each file separately?

[Mr.Dandy]

Could you show us with a screenshot what you means?

[Hagar Delest]

Can' t Cinnamon display icons instead of thumbnails in its settings? But it would apply to all files.

[White Phoenix]

Can' t Cinnamon display icons instead of thumbnails in its settings? But it would apply to all files.

Yeah, while I was looking for information about settings I found that Cinnamon doesn’t do that. Actually, Linux has icon mode, compact mode and list mode. I use compact mode which normally shows thumbnails except for movies, images, and open document files. I was able to change the behavior so it shows icons now, but not the Apache icons that are in the Gnome set. Now I’m trying to figure out how to get those icons to be used instead of the generic icons. So far the only thing I can think of is to copy the Gnome icons to a special folder, rename them to match the set that’s being displayed, then rename the icons in the set that’s being displayed with .bak, and copy the replacements into the folder that’s being selected. In case the system updates the icons, I will just copy them over again.

[Bill]

Can' t Cinnamon display icons instead of thumbnails in its settings? But it would apply to all files.

Yeah, while I was looking for information about settings I found that Cinnamon doesn’t do that. Actually, Linux has icon mode, compact mode and list mode. I use compact mode which normally shows thumbnails except for movies, images, and open document files. I was able to change the behavior so it shows icons now,...

How did you change that behavior? Is it a setting in the file manager?

On my Ubuntu MATE system, No thumbnails were displayed in the file manager by default in Icon View, List View or Compact View. After using Synaptic to install the optional ooo-thumbnailer package, thumbnails were always shown. I had to remove the ooo-thumbnailer package and delete the thumbnails from the thumbnail cache to go back to the display of icons instead thumbnails for the files. Is the ooo-thumbnailer installed in Mint?

[floris v]

Schermafdruk van 2024-10-12 19-55-55.png (2.19 KiB) Viewed 668 times

For me, the icons look like this in Mint 20. odt gets a blue bar on the left with something like text on the right, ods gets a grid, etc. Not exactly the official OpenOffice icons, to be sure.

[White Phoenix]

Since the gnome icons are being phased out, I saved the original gnome icons which are the official AOO icons including the extensions icon, but the oxygen icons were nice so I went with those.
I kept a log of what I did and shortened it a little.
This is how I have it set up now, but with oxygen icons instead of gnome icons.

My icon theme is Oxygen. This is what was in the /user/share/thumbnailers/gsf-office.thumbnailer file:

Code: Select all

[Thumbnailer Entry]
TryExec=gsf-office-thumbnailer
Exec=gsf-office-thumbnailer -i %i -o %o -s %s
MimeType=application/msword;application/vnd.ms-excel;application/vnd.ms-powerpoint;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics-template;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.image;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation-template;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-template;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-master;application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template;application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation;application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet;application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document;application/vnd.sun.xml.calc;application/vnd.sun.xml.calc.template;application/vnd.sun.xml.draw;application/vnd.sun.xml.draw.template;application/vnd.sun.xml.impress;application/vnd.sun.xml.impress.template;application/vnd.sun.xml.math;application/vnd.sun.xml.writer;application/vnd.sun.xml.writer.global;application/vnd.sun.xml.writer.template

I copied the official Apache icons from /user/share/icons/gnome/128x128/apps/ into a ~/.local/share/icons/oxygen/base/mimetypes/128x128 folder to overwrite where the gsf thumbnailer file was pointing to.

I created a new thumbnailer folder in ~/.local/share/ and copied the above file into it. I then added the following code directly after the equal sign.

Code: Select all

application/openoffice4-base;application/openoffice4-calc;application/openoffice4-draw;application/openoffice4-extension;application/openoffice4-impress;application/openoffice4-main;application/openoffice4-math;application/openoffice4-printeradmin;application/openoffice4-startcenter;application/openoffice4-writer;

Using bulky I renamed the icons in ~/.local/share/oxygen/base/mimetypes from openoffice4-*.png to application-openoffice4-*.png. which was prefixed to match the vnd.*.png files in /icons/share/oxygen/base/128x128/mimetypes/ folder.

After several attempts try different methods I wound up with creating an empty gsf-office.thumbnailer file in ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/. This caused the thumbnails to change to the icons in /icons/oxygen/base/mimetypes/128x128/. Even though they aren’t needed now, I still have the old gnome AOO icons in my ~/.local/share/oxygen folder.

If the empty file in the thumbnailers folder is replaced by an update, I still have the backup copy in my ~/.local/share/thumbnailers/ folder and on my backup drive which will still have the backups in my Linux/Root folder and several iterations in the timeshift folder which is also on my 12.6 TiB backup drive.

The original files are still on my backup drive in the Linux/home/ folder and in the timeshift folder in several timepoints.
With thumbnails.

Screenshot from 2024-10-13 00-00-23.png (52.01 KiB) Viewed 564 times

With icons.

Screenshot from 2024-10-13 00-33-22.png (81.83 KiB) Viewed 564 times