Picture a .deb file in your mind and chances are it’ll be a beige box with a dreary uniform look. Uniformly uninformative, at that.

Ubuntu 11.04 may just see this change thanks to ‘Deb-thumbnailer’.

Deb-thumbnailer, which we’ve covered in the past, makes .deb files much easier to understand and distinguish between by using the respective application icon, drawn from inside the .deb file, as an emblem over the standard .deb icon.

Pictures speak a thousand words and all that:-

deb-thumbnails[12]

Image of  deb-thumbnailer from July

Amongst a sea of downloaded .deb files my eyes would have a much easier time locating what I’m looking for were it to use an icon to specify what it is.

Shipping by default

Ubuntu’s Matthew Paul Thomas has, in a bug report asking for the utility to be packaged, said: –

“…we would like to ship deb-thumbnailer in Ubuntu by default.”

If all goes to plan this is great news for Ubuntu users, the guys behind the app and for me personally: the project was born as a response to a post from June 2010 asking ‘if wine installers can look fancy why can’t .debs?‘

natty