Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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