gDesklets - provides an advanced architecture for desktop applets

gdesklets [ display ]

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.

gDesklets 0.30 uses a slightly different way of storing configuration. If you want to keep your old configuration, you have to run the migration-tool:

$ migration-tool

Many thanks to Dave Masterson for writing this handy wizard!

You can find an entry in the GNOME menu after a successful installation. This will start the gDesklets Shell where you can install and run desktop applets. When you log out or quit 'gDesklets', the settings will be remembered for the next session.

The command line tool gdesklets lets you perform all administration tasks from the command line.

Display files can be opened using

$ gdesklets open <displayfile>

If the gdesklets-daemon wasn't running, this will start up the daemon as well. You can only have one daemon per X-display. The daemon can be stopped again by calling

$ gdesklets stop

Usage of the command line frontend:

gdesklets [option] <command> [arguments...]

<command>: open <files> (Opens the given display files) start (Runs the gDesklets daemon) stop (Stops the gDesklets daemon) list (Lists open displays) restart (Restarts the gDesklets daemon) profile <profile> (Switches to the given profile) profile (Shows the current and the available profiles) shell (Opens the graphical shell) slay (Kills the daemon -- use in emergency) about (Prints information about gDesklets) version (Prints gDesklets version) help (Displays this text)

[option]: --translucent (Enables translucency on the freedesktop.org XServer)

The --translucent option is still in an experimental state, though. It may or may not work as expected.

The shell is a graphical frontend for managing your desklets. You can start it either by selecting it from the GNOME menu (Accessories -> gDesklets), by selecting it from the tray icon popup menu, or by calling:

$ gdesklets shell

The shell currently lets you create and switch between profiles, install new desklets and search for desklets. New desklets can be installed by dragging links from your web browser or files from the file manager into its window, or by selecting the menu item "File -> Install package...".

Displays (as we call the applets) will usually appear in the top left corner of your screen when you first run them. You can move displays around by pressing and holding down the middle mouse button. 'gDesklets' will remember the new position of the display for the future.

If you press the right mouse button over a display, a popup menu will open. It depends on the display what you will see there, but the following items are always available:

Configure display

Opens the configuration dialog for this display. It depends on the display what you can configure. Restart display

Restarts this display. This menu item is mainly for sensor debugging. Remove display

Removes this display from your desktop.

The site 'http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org' is the place where you can get new desklets or upload your own creations for sharing them with other users.

The site 'http://gnomesupport.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=23' is the official gDesklets' 'Discussion Forum' where you can get help.

You can meet the gDesklets developers and other fans on the IRC channel #gdesklets on GIMPnet (irc.gimp.org).

gDesklets was written by

* Martin Grimme <martin@pycage.de>.

* Christian Meyer <chrisime@gnome-de.org>.

* Jesse Andrews <jdandr2@cs.uky.edu>.

I'd like to thank all people who supported (and are still supporting) me so well with 'gDesklets'. Please complain if I forgot you... ;)

* Christian Meyer -- ideas and sensor programming

* Jesse Andrews -- sensor programming

* Johannes "Waldgeist" Rebhan -- artwork

* Christian Neumair -- installation

* Sebastien Bacher -- man page and lots of other stuff

* Luke Stroven -- gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org and 'gDesklets' forum

* James Henstridge -- excellent GTK bindings for Python

If you encounter bugs which are not listed here, please post a bug report at bugzilla.gnome.org for dBgDesklets.

* some versions of sawfish show displays with the 'below' flag set above other windows; this is a bug in sawfish; go complain there :)

* some buggy versions of 'nautilus' can cause 'gDesklets' to crash when the desktop background is being changed

* transparency might be broken on Xinerama displays; we do not have Xinerama and thus cannot test it. If you want to help testing, please drop us a mail

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTIBILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the file 'COPYING' for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this software; if not, write to the

Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 390, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

This software is provided "as is" and the author is not and cannot be made responsible for any damage resulting from the use of this software.