Andrea Olivato’s Blog

During the last few days I enjoyed myself destroying my gentoo gnome installation upgrading from 2.24 to newer 2.26 which is not included in default portage. I installed it from gnome overlay and as I was resolving dependancies and compiling a lot I decided to enable support for pulseaudio. I added the use flag to my make.conf and then emerged necessary packages.

As I’m not a multimedia man, I can’t really understand how and when pulseaudio has a better rending then other systems, however I really appreciate the possibility of setting each application volume, feature that I was missing before.

The only thing I still needed and that I did not find on the overlay was an applet to replace the deprecated gnome-volume-control. So I googled a bit and found gnome-pulse-applet project on google code.

Installation is very easy. It’s just a matter of

wget http://gnome-pulse-applet.googlecode.com/files/gnome-pulse-applet-0.2.tar.gz
tar xvf gnome-pulse-applet-0.2.tar.gz
cd gnome-pulse-applet-0.2
make
sudo make install

After compiling it, I had to restart my gnome environment as just killing and restarting the panel gave me some python errors.

Result is very nice, the applet is minimal and useful, it got some preferences in which you can choose the direction of the applet and the default output source. I really suggest every one using Pulseaudio to use this applet…

Just a quick tip to monitor download status and problems while using Amule. On Gnome, the program notify is used to show notifications on the desktop, for example evolution uses it for new messages alerts.

Amule does not support it natively but on its configuration panel it is possible to specify a custom command to launch on some events. For example, as you can see from below screenshots I set to launch the command

notify-send "Download Completato - %FILE"

when a Download finshes.

You can set other custom events obviously, like errors or chats, also using native amule variables like %FILE, which prints out the name of the file that determinated the event.

I submitted asdGB to the two most used gnome apps websites. You can find my work on the following links

Gtk Apps

Gnome Files

Have you ever dreamed about an andvanced IA (I’m ironic) who could understand what browser you opened and open all the links you click on your DE in THAT browser and not in the default one?

Well this is asdGB (Automatically set default Gnome browser), a simple bash script which runs in background, checks for opened browsers and sets the default handler for http / https links on the one you prefer. Obviously if you got only one browser opened it will set that one as default. This means memory and resource saving. This means no more too many windows opened.

asdGB is released under GPL v3 licence and it’s as simple as ./asdGB.sh!

Official Page and Download:

http://blog.andreaolivato.net/software/asdgb-automatically-set-default-gnome-browser

A quick pearl to spread an old news about Epiphany to other browser’s users:

with Epiphany, when you open a new tab from a link (middle click or right click + open in a new tab) the browser keeps the history of the parent tab!!!

Yes, for those who know that’s probably not a big deal, however I like this feature so much I needed to spread!

Use Epiphany! You can go back in a just opened tab!

Reading Federico’s article about the Remember the Milk AIR client get me more interested on RTM ( still Remember the Milk, not Read The Manual ) and curious about the possibilities offered by this Service.

Looking around the net I found that this guy created a nice integration beetween RTM and Gnome DE, using the Deskbar Applet. I’m not a Deskbar fan, I thinks it’s quite heavy on loading and I always preferred not adding it to my panel, however I decided to use it only for RTM tasking, disabling all others plugins.

In the screenshot above you can see the nice result I got with a 30secs installation. Just downloaded the plugin, extracted it (withouth the directory, just the two files) indide my :

~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/modules-2.20-compatible

In some enviroments the directory can also be

~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/handlers

Then I just added the applet to my panel, disabled all plugins from it except the RTM one and configured Remember The Milk, confirming in the browser the possibility to access the APIs.

In the above picture it was shown what happens when you digit on the deskbar a name for a task that you have not inserted yet. Below you can see what happes when you digit something that is both contained in one ore more tasks but can also be a new one.

If you click on the Icon or on the text you will be browser redirected to website while if you click on the arrows you will be prompted for new interaction and/or more informations will be shown.

As example below you can see what happens when clicking on the arrow near the Add Task instruction: you can choose in which folder save your new task…

If you want to modify or view a task you can click on the arrow near the name of the old task and this is what you get:

Conclusions: useful instrument, nice interaction with Gnome DE. I like it!