Tumbler: disabling ODF and PDF
Posted: 2012-10-30 Filed under: desktop, system | Tags: odf, pdf, tumbler 2 CommentsSince XFCE 4.10, Thunar does not display thumbnails for some PDF files. There was a short discussion on LQ started by me, but I did not find a solution. Anyway, it annoys me, so I would prefer to have no thumbnails for PDF files rather than that. Also, I do not like to have thumbnails for ODF files. So, what to do?
Simple — recompile tumbler with two options. Grab the source, slackbuild and slack-desc from a convenient mirror and modify the tumbler.SlackBuild like this:
# Configure:
CFLAGS="$SLKCFLAGS" \
./configure \
--prefix=/usr \
--libdir=/usr/lib${LIBDIRSUFFIX} \
--sysconfdir=/etc \
--mandir=/usr/man \
--docdir=/usr/doc/$PKGNAM-$VERSION \
--disable-odf-thumbnailer \
--disable-poppler-thumbnailer \
--disable-static \
--disable-debug \
--build=$ARCH-slackware-linux || exit 1
Remove the default package and install the new package instead. To get rid of the thumbnails already generated, delete ~/.thumbnails — it will remove everything generated so far! That’s it…
slackalaxy.com 
In Xubuntu, odf thumbnailer packed as separate package call “tumbler-plugins-extra”. You can simply remove it to disable odf thumbnail.
But pdf thumbnailer come in main package “tumbler” so you can easily remove it except you don’t want to thumbnail anything (In my case, I still need thumbnailing images/pictures). So, what I do is rename/remove shared library related to pdf thumbnailer:
$ sudo mv /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-poppler-thumbnailer.so /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/tumbler-1/plugins/tumbler-poppler-thumbnailer.so.bak
Then regenerate thumbnail by remove ~/.thumbnails directory:
$ rm ~/.thumbnails
Viola! :)
[…] I have problems with it displaying the icons of some PDF files. As a "solution", I recompile it disabling the generation of PDF thumbnails. Once upon a time, Thunar displayed thumbnails of PDFs only after Evince was installed and I had […]