UPDATE: For Ubuntu 12.04 it has become much easier to hide a folder and in general keep things private – just go to “System Settings” and find the “Privacy” button at the “Personal” tab. If you have Ubuntu 12.04 or newer, then I will strongly recommend you to use the built-in Privacy system. However, if you are stuck with Ubuntu less than 12.04, then you can read the following guide:
The Activity Log Manager can exclude certain folders/files from showing up in the Unity Dash on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot
1. Download latest Activity Log Manager from this site (look for the “Downloads” section to the right of the page): https://launchpad.net/activity-log-manager
Here is a direct link for the lazy geeks (but that link will be outdated when a new version of Activity-Log-Manager is released):
http://launchpad.net/activity-log-manager/0.8/0.8.0/+download/activity-log-manager-0.8.0.tar.gz
2. Unzip the activity-log-manager-0.8.0.tar.gz to somewhere convenient – e.g. your homefolder:
/home/YOUR_USERNAME/activityLogJournal
3. Now open a new terminal window by pressing CTRL+ALT+T and navigate to the unzipped folder:
cd /home/YOUR_USERNAME/activityLogJournal
4. Now make activity-log-manager executable:
chmod +x activity-log-manager
5. Run activity-log-manager using the following command:
./activity-log-manager
(If there is some .py error now, then please write a comment to my post including the full error message and then I will try to solve it – It is probably just a missing dependency but make sure that you are using Ubuntu 11.10.)
You should see the following window:
6. Click the “Files” tab.
8. Click where your username (YOUR_USERNAME) is located (look at where the cursor is located on the previous screenshot).
9. Click “other” and find the folder you want to exclude from the Unity Dash history.
10. Click “Ok” and Click “Add” and from now on that folder will be excluded from the Unity Dash history.
11. DONE. You can also delete any existing Unity Dash history by navigating to the “History” tab (which can be seen on the screenshot above), select the desired timeframe and click “Ok”.
Comments
I covered this topic for ubuntu 11.04 in a previous post (), but as that does not work anymore in Ubuntu 11.10, so I thought that I should publish a new guide 🙂
You could also setup a new repository for activity-log-manager instead of downloading the source, but that seems overkill if you are only going to setup the blacklisting once like me.
Ubuntu 4 ever!!! 🙂 Please feel free to leave me a comment, so I know that my effort is not wasted 🙂
The tip is great. However, Ubuntu itself is starting to feel more and more like micorosft windows and less and less like a usable operating system with every release. Somewhere around 10.04 they actually made a system which one could install and use. However, 11.04 and 11.10 are simply not release ready, and the plethora of pages with help, hints and fixes just demonstrate that.
Seriously reconsidering my operating system choice now.
Thanks for the comment, glad I could help! I agree on your remarks – especially Unity has been pushed out in a rush instead of slowly adjusting it to the users needs. I have sort of got used to Unity, but I really find it that it limits my productivity because it is essentially designed for tablets and not big screen desktop PC’s. It seems like Canonical was afraid to fall behind in the technology race (tablets, tablets, tablets and now TV’s) and they overestimated their own capability. I would really like to see Ubuntu optimise rather than inventing everything from the scratch. Otherwise I have to switch distribution in the future (but I am NOT going back to windows hehe).
Thanks for the great tutorial,
however I got this error message when running ./activity-log-manager:
===
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “./activity-log-manager”, line 87, in
window = Window()
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 49, in __init__
self._set_up_ui()
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 61, in _set_up_ui
self._set_up_applications_tab()
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 97, in _set_up_applications_tab
self.applications_tab = ApplicationsTab()
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 345, in __init__
self.app_chooser_dialog = ApplicationsChooserDialog()
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 713, in __init__
self._set_up_ui()
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 721, in _set_up_ui
self.treeview._populate_view()
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 686, in _populate_view
pix = self._get_pixbuf_from_gio_icon(icon)
File “/home/goji/activity-log-manager-0.8.0/src/window.py”, line 674, in _get_pixbuf_from_gio_icon
pix = icon_info.load_icon()
glib.GError: Compressed icons are not supported
===
I’m still new in ubuntu so I couldn’t “read” the error message my self, really appreciate your help.
Thanks.
Hmm that seems weird – how about trying out some of the solutions found here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/activity-log-manager/+bug/792288
Please let us know if that works 🙂
thank you,
I’ve already bookmark this bug page and will look for it more often 🙂
hehe Launchpad is one of the best places to look for Ubuntu fixes 🙂
yep thank you,
followed the described step, but still ends with error, 🙁
however the last error said this:
NameError: global name ‘Nothing’ is not defined
Update!
Just ‘accidentally’ found the way to fix it. But I dont know if it will also work for other machine.
lol 😀 (See comment number #7 at https://bugs.launchpad.net/activity-log-manager/+bug/792288)
Great stuff man, thanks a lot for posting the solution – internet karma +1 for you 🙂
Nice!
How do I hide folders suggested in the Unity Search Bar? they are suggested anyway in File and Folders at the same location just without the last used date
hey did you see the update to the article? It contains info on how to ensure privacy on Ubuntu version 12.04+