New .deb Thumbnailer script gives .deb installers application icons (updated)

I love how fast the Open Source community works. I really do.

Earlier today I posted an article titled “IF WINE INSTALLERS CAN LOOK FANCY, WHY NOT .DEBS?” which asked the question ‘Why do .debs files have to look so drab?’. Plenty of you engaged with the idea straight away and added in your own thoughts or reasoning’s on the the addition of application icons to .deb files.

A reader by the name of Alex Eftimie not only read that post but has gone on to make a small script that pretty much does exactly what was posed! It places the respective application icon over the standard .deb icon, as demonstrated below, providing that the .deb file itself contains the application icon.

Alex notes that “There is definitely more work to do, including: testing, excluded paths, default icons for applications/libraries, performance, .desktop analysis, getting rid of the annoying frame around the thumbnail” but being hard at work on his Graduation thesis he doesn’t have much time to work on it further. Instead, he has put the project on Launchpad so that others wishing to get involved may continue the project.

Hopefully there are many of you out there who would love to spend some time on this because it is a great little project that, for many casual users, gives a huge usability boon.

Install

In the mean time you can try out Alex’s script by installing the following .deb package and follow Alex’s instructions: –

“If you want to test it, simply install the deb, then log out and log back in (so that gconf gets refreshed). The easiest way to see something is opening nautilus -> ctr+L -> /var/cache/apt/archives .”
(Source is available here.)