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gDesklets - Gnome2's Karamba
Deusy writes "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba. I've heard a lot of noise with regards to Karamba (and Super Karamba) and a lot of moans from Gnome users about the lack of a Gnome equivalent. Hopefully this should fill that void and more, as one of the developers comments that gDesklets is the product of "months of planning" and describes Karamba as an "ugly hack"."
gDesklets provides an advanced architecture for desktop applets - tiny displays sitting on your desktop in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness.
Populate your desktop with status meters, icon bars, weather sensors, news tickers... whatever you can imagine! Virtually anything is possible and maybe even available some day.
The system consists of three parts: the gDesklets core (a daemon running in the background), the Sensors (providing data and processing user actions), and the Displays (what you will see on the screen).
New Displays can be put together by simply composing widgets and Sensors in a XML file. Advanced users may also create new Sensors easily.
As of now, Sensors are restricted to Python modules, but we are planning to extend this to scripting languages like Perl and Ruby, and to C as well.
You can get gDesklets from: www.pycage.de/software_gdesklets.html
Have fun!
Martin Grimme
Christian Meyer
Jesse Andrews
Try konfabulator which does the same for Apples. I've bought it and love the way I have so much eye candy on the screen that I end up only using about two thirds for productive work!
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
Since version 2.0, the default GNOME window manager is metacity. For more information I suggest you visit www.gnome.org instead of asking really basic questions on /.
As I stated in another comment, that "ugly hack" type comment was entered in jest, and the story submitter chose to interpret it differently.
One reason Gnome people haven't been in any real hurry, I think, is that a lot use gkrellm, which sort of does the same thing. The Karamba people decided something better was needed and implemented their thing. Now some Gnome people find that Karamba is sweet, and does something similar in turn for Gnome (but with the great benefit of hindsight from how Karamba is used). No doubt some KDE people will learn from gDesklets and make something even better.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
This is ActiveDesktop from Microsoft reimplemented. Not very hooray, is it?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
You didn't bother looking into the packages they distribute, did you? Their .display files are XML.
--
I refuse to use
I'm sorry, sir, but you're mistaken here.
You could quite easily replace kwin with WM of your choice - just look into startkde script, and notice KDE_WM environment variable.
I'm running my own window manager (TrsWM) with KDE, and it gives me wonderfully useable desktop.
The parent is an absolute troll... but ok, I'll bite.
7) The half assed way of changing screen resolutions. The Xrandr hack is useless if you want to change colour depth.
This is an XFree86 issue, no?
5) Nautilus, half asssed file management with no "real" features. Guess whos using konqueror.
Have you bothered to actually use Nautilus? If anything, it has more features than Konqueror. It's incredibly pluggable, with hundreds of enhancement pluggins. It's now fairly efficient and usable even on my lowly 700mhz celeron.
Personally, I was quite impressed by Nautilus of late. I guess you last used one of the 1.0.x series of Nautilus.
4) Its word processor (Abi word office) has no table support
You obviously haven't used AbiWord 1.99.3 (2.0 beta3). All recent work (the last year or so) on AbiWord has gone into version 2 - which is due to be released at the end of August. AbiWord 2 has many amazing features, tables included. Other such cool features are the Open Text Summariser and Enchant. Check them both out on the AbiWord homepage.
3) The clock, in its asswipe MM/DD format (again W!=USA)
You can change that, you're trolling with that one.
2) The file dialog (no further comment)
Being fixed in Gtk 2.4. Possibly your only valid complaint.
1) HAVOC PENNINGTON
The consensus among the majority of Gnome users and developers are that the HIG is a great thing which you obviously don't understand. It's not 'remove features', it's 'be sensible about them'.
Havoc is a dedicated and decent member of the Gnome community and Gnome - and open source in general - would be much worse off without him.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
That wouldn't have been possible. Karamba is very much written for KDE using the KDE/qt libs.
;-) there's really things that I didn't like.
Work that is needed to port karamba to gnome:
* write a qt/glib wrapper (kde/gnome)
* use C instead of C++
The amount of work is much higher than a complete new architecture. And you might have read that we're sit down about 2 months to create a very flexible architecture.
Please check the class diagram: UML
I have had a look at karmaba's source code and before assuming that i don't know C++
The main disadvantage IMHO is that there's no real seperation of the view and the "backend".
in gDesklets you have the core (which is the framework) the Sensors (which gather information) and Displays (XML) which are connected to the Sensors. You could have several Displays which show you the sensor data. And you just have to create a new XML file. That's simply not possible with karamba and that's where the app lacks flexibility!
HTH,
chrisime
1. XML is readable by people. You don't end up with useless legacy binary files with XML.
2. You don't have to write yet another file format IO library - you can download XML readers and writers for any language, and there are simple and easy APIs (like SAX) for extracting the information.
3. XML files are cross-platform - there are no issues like endian-ness or word length to prevent the data being read.
4. XML files are self-documenting in terms of structure - tags, attributes and text content are understood by everyone - you don't need to specify your own delimiter set, escape characters, line terminators etc.
5. XML files can be validated for correctness.
6. XML is extensible. You can take someone else's format, and add your own tags with your own namespace, extending the structure of the data without altering the meaning for legacy programs (programs need only interpret the tags they recognise).
7. XML is transformable. You can easily port data between different XML tag sets, or to another file format (PS,PDF,RTF,SVG etc) using XSLT style sheets.
8. XML is searchable. You can store in XML repositories and it will be searchable on tags and attributes.
9. XML is international. There are defined mechanisms for coding international characters.
10. Almost everyone is either using it, or going to. Microsoft Office can load and save XML. Microsoft .Net and the SOAP services use XML for communication. The OpenOffice native file format is a ZIPed directory containg XML files. Why not be compatible, rather than write your own custom format?
So Yes, Everything Should Be XML
Since they are all tied together in an attempt to destroy linux, I say "Fuck You" to all of them.
Do a web search on google or forbes magazine, for kripes sake.