Linux.Desktop.Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 46. Grow Your GNOME with gDesklets Steroids

Spiff up your GNOME desktop with various
information panels and interactive gadgets.

gDesklets are GNOME's
answer to KDE's
karamba and superkaramba.
You can set up and use gDesklets that place
system information, clocks, and other information on your desktop.
Some gDesklets provide more interactive
functions. Even though they are associated primarily with GNOME,
gDesklets are not GNOME-only programs. The
gDesklets system runs reasonably well with other
window managers, even KDE.

Like the KDE gadget programs, gDesklets depend
heavily on Python and Python interfaces to GNOME. Here are the
minimum requirements for gDesklets to work (some
sensors might have extra requirements):

Python 2.3 or higher

pygtk 2.0.0 or higher

libgtop2

librsvg

GConf

gnome-python 2.0.0 or higher

GConf support for gnome-python (plus the extra
package gnome-python2-gconf on Red Hat Linux)

The web site for gDesklets is at http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org/, but you
won't find RPMs there. Your best bet is to search
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3
for RPM packages for Fedora, SUSE, Mandrake, and others, and
you'll also find some RPM packages at http://www.rpmfind.net. Debian and Gentoo
provide packages you can download through their Internet installers,
apt-get and emerge,
respectively.

Although both superkaramba and
gDesklets provide a user interface for selecting
gadgets (called displays), the one for gDesklets
is the only one worth using. In most cases, you should be able to
start up the gDesklets Display selector by
choosing gDesklets from the GNOMEApplications menu,
although the location of the selection varies considerably from one
Linux distribution to the next.

Once you find the selection and start gDesklets,
it launches itself as a daemon that runs in the background, after
which it presents the gDesklets interface to
select from a variety of displays (Figure 6-1).
Double-click a display selection on the right to start up that
display.

Figure 6-1. gDesklets selector

In my past, personal use, the gDesklets selector
shell (which launches the daemon) often failed to start a display, or
the shell interface crashed before I had a chance to select a
display. Recent updates to GNOME seem to have fixed this problem.
Regardless, if this happens to you, you can usually bypass the
launcher and start up a display directly from the command line. The
trick is to use the --no-config switch for it to
work (gDesklets is evolving and changing
rapidly, as are the rules for its use, so even that switch might not
be necessary at some point). For example, to launch the clock
display, use this command:

$ gdesklets --no-config /usr/share/gdesklets/Displays/Clock/osXclock.display

Of course, launching from the command line gives you the ability to
autolaunch a gDesklets display each time you start GNOME [Hack #72] . Figure 6-2
shows both the clock and the weather display.

Figure 6-2. Two gDesklets on the GNOME desktop